With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/364562
was making three times more than you're making for doing about the same work, how would you feel as a human being? A social change needs to take place in the service industry in North America." The new wage structure at Smoke 'N Water also falls within the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives' defi nition of a living wage. In 2014 in the Qualicum/Parksville area, that's calcu- lated to be $17.42 per hour—for a family with two children and two parents who work full-time—which the CCPA argues provides a basic level of economic secu- rity. (In Metro Vancouver, it's $20.10 per hour.) Minimum wage, as Iglika Ivanova, an economist and public inter- est researcher at the CCPA, points out, doesn't come close to covering costs. "The miminum wage is $10.25, and if you work 40 hours a week for 50 weeks, that works out to $20,500 annually," says Iva- nova. "The poverty line—the low-income cutoff before tax for a large city like Van- couver—is just over $23,000." Ivanova doesn't buy the idea that a tipping culture creates top-level ser- vice in most restaurants. "I come from Bulgaria," she says. "We don't do tip- ping—it's just expected that the price of your meal includes something built in for proper wages of the staff , as prices do for any other service you purchase. When I fi rst came to North America, people tried to explain that it's about the quality of service—you can reward the server. But that's not how it works. A lot of my friends who have been serv- ers say they always tip now, regardless of service, because they know the base wages are so low." While David Jones is reportedly the fi rst to attempt the new non-tip- ping restaurant model in Canada, he has a few predecessors south of the border. Alice Waters's San Francisco restaurant, Chez Panisse, famously went tip-free nearly 20 years ago as a means of shifting the disparity in wages between front and back of house. That restaurant now charges a fl at service fee of 17 per cent, which is divided among everyone on the team. In San Diego, Jay Porter's The Linkery earned a name for itself for its strict anti-tipping policy, and Porter himself penned a few articles stating that ser- vice improved once he did away with tips in 2006. Sushi Yasuda followed suit in New York City in 2013, posting a note to customers that it would be following Japan's customs and paying their servers a living wage. In Athens, Ohio, the employee-own- ers of the Casa Nueva worker co-op res- taurant decided they needed to rethink their system in September 2012, after the U.S. Department of Labor ruled that the restaurant's practice of sharing tips with non-traditionally tipped employ- ees (cooks, dishwashers, et cetera)—a practice that's commonplace in Can- ada—was illegal. "Rather than make it inequitable between our employees, we stopped taking tips altogether," says Grace Corbin, marketing coordi- nator for Casa Nueva. To compensate, they raised their prices about 20 per cent across the board; employees share a percentage of the gross sales based on the number of hours they've worked. It's still a variable wage—if business is good, the staff 's income is up—but wages have become more predictable 58 BCBusiness September 2014 "Our North American approach is the 'Hi, I'm Bruce, I'm your waiter....' That's how service has evolved in North America. It's very personality-centred.... There isn't tip- ping in Italy, and the service is good, but diff erent. The waiters don't come over and introduce themselves— they're there to get what you need when you need it" —Bruce McAdams, University of Guelph professor