Lindsay comments on Zach’s story:
I appreciate this very much! I have been waiting table for the last four years. Restaurants take advantage of servers. In my first job, it was the servers responsibility to do tasks completely unrelated to serving the guests. We had to take the food temperatures, and do all the cleaning at the end of the night, while everyone who had a decent hourly wage got to go home early. There would be times when the store would close at 9 or 10 and the servers would be there until 1 or 2 in the morning working for $2.13 an hour finishing up cleaning.
For over four years, I worked as both a tip-earning waiter and as a manager in local restaurants, and I have seen countless cases of my fellow employees walking out with less than the federal minimum wage in their pockets. It is not just the “bad waiters and waitresses” that don’t make any money. It happens to the most skilled, most experienced, and hardest working peoples in the restaurants. It has happened to me, it has happened to dozens of my co-workers, and it will continue to happen unless the State of Kansas joins states like California, Oregon, Minnesota, and Montana and raises their state minimum wage for tipped employees to match the federal minimum wage.
Continue reading ‘Zach’s Story’
