Racial differences in restaurant tipping: A labour process perspective

Considering the increasing proportion of US workers who depend on gratuities for a substantial amount of their income, it is not surprising that a growing body of literature across a variety of disciplines examines the phenomenon of tipping. Only recently, however, have scholars begun to study variation in tipping behaviours across social groups. The bulk of this research focuses on tipping disparities between white and black restaurant patrons in the USA. Two dominant explanations for such disparities have been posited: one locates the source of race-based tipping disparities in the discriminatory behaviour of restaurant servers; the other framework argues that disparities emerge as a result of African-Americans' lack of familiarity with societal norms for tipping. In this paper, we outline and critique the above frameworks and offer an alternative yet complementary framework that explains race-based tipping differentials in terms of server/customer interactions within the broader labour process of restaurant serving. We argue that black--white variation in tipping behaviours persist as a result of utilitarian processes in which service providers attempt to minimize economic uncertainty and occupational powerlessness by withholding subtle forms of service from patrons whom they view to be unpredictable tippers and thus undesirable patrons. It is suggested that this labour process approach extends the scope of analysis of previously posited explanations for the black--white tipping differential to include other social groups that are also thought to be below-average tippers. We conclude by offering several hypotheses and avenues for future research on disparities in tipping behaviours that derive from the labour process approach we present.