Hi friends,
I recently introduced my Brooklyn Public Library book group to the idiom “short shrift.” We are reading The Phantom Tollbooth, in which young Milo and his watchdog friend, Tock, are sentenced to six million years in a dungeon on trumped-up charges. Fortunately, they are informed by their fellow prisoner, Faintly Macabre, that Officer Shrift
loves to put people in prison, but he doesn’t care about keeping them there.
And so they are shown the way out and they continue on with their adventures.
This short post is about some folks who get short shrift — minimal consideration — from our system. The first such group are women in prison.
In 2021, the last year for which there is complete data, there were more than 83,000 women in prison in the US and more than 85,000 in jails, many of whom were held on bail.
#FreeBlackMamas is an annual campaign designed to keep women out of jail. The program calls attention to the human costs of locking women up because they can’t make bail.
Contribute to the National Bail Out’s Free Black Mamas campaign.
Another group that too often gets short shrift are the caregivers who make it possible for the rest of us to do our jobs.
In San Francisco, unions negotiated a four-year contract with the city’s Board of Supervisors to pay caregivers a minimum of $25/hour, beginning in September. This is good news for almost 25,000 caregivers and the folks they care for in San Francisco.
Tell Governor Hochul to take note: a caring economy pays caregivers fairly and saves money and allows people to remain in their homes.
Next up are the folks who work for tips. If you’re like most New Yorkers, you have a lot of encounters with these folks. You are probably less inclined to give them short shrift if you or someone you love has ever been in their shoes.
There have been periodic movements to move away from tipping, a practice that enables the exploitation of workers by allowing employers to pay them very little. Its origins date to feudal Europe, a social model with little to recommend it.
Unsurprisingly, tipping took root in the US during the period following the Civil War, when recently emancipated Black people were suddenly ‘free’ to earn their living.
Suddenly there were millions of young men, old men, young women, older women who now were free, but had no jobs. They didn't have land. They weren't educated because they never got a chance to be educated. And at about this time, restaurant owners began to hire them in their restaurants as restaurant workers. And they didn't pay them. And they had to make their wage through tips.
Tipping still brings a lot of class baggage. A few years ago, I researched how much to tip the man who tuned my piano. Apparently, the convention is that you don’t need to tip workers who have specialized skills which require extensive training and experience, because those are factored into the price of the service.
One website said that if you could do the work yourself, you should tip. This is an unhelpful standard, since we are not all equally capable.
Another problem with the special skills-training-experience standard is that tipping renders others inferior and feeds a great mythology. Waiting tables, for example, is skilled labor involving speed, balance, coordination, and memory.
Baristas train to use different machines and to decorate your drink with latte art. The first robot barista is coming soon to Brooklyn. Oof. There’s some short shrift.
Also, I think robot slavery is a real problem.
Even the most competent people kid themselves if they imagine that there is really such a thing as unskilled labor.
I would be greatly relieved if tipping were unnecessary. I can do the math, but once, I was so busy saying goodbye to friends at the end of a meal in another city that I made an error that shorted our excellent server. The next day, I arranged an additional payment. Then I wondered how often this happens to servers and whether I’d done it before without realizing.
When the NYS legislature raised the minimum wage this month, which will reach $17 in the New York City area by 2026 and $16 upstate, the increase fell far short of the initial proposals from either house.
Under the plan in this year’s budget, the minimum wage could well have less purchasing power in 2026 than it did in 2019, even if inflation shrinks from recent record highs.
Read Sam Mellins’s “New York’s Minimum Wage Hike Has a Big Catch.”
In New York, restaurant workers earn a subminimum wage that is two-thirds of the minimum. This base pay is augmented by tips. Tipped workers are more vulnerable to sexual harassment and racial discrimination, but less able to address offensive customer behavior, which can result in lost tips.
Tell your NYS legislators that workers who rely on tips need a wage hike. This quick action is from the National Women’s Law Center.
If you eat out, tip well — not because you feel guilty — but because tips are how some folks earn a living.
Well, it’s not such a short post after all. I started by talking about a story and will end by talking about our stories.
Stories are an important way of understanding the humanity and complexity of the human experience. I have confused my own adult child by my mixed feelings about Mother’s Day. It has always seemed to be a reductive, weird way of honoring a primary relationship.
Moms Rising has invited us to share a story that will deepen our collective understanding of motherhood.
Tell us about a mom that has inspired you to fight for moms, families, and our world
How has a mom you love changed the world for the better?
What does being a mother mean to you?
What are some of the challenges you face in being a mom?
Share a story with Moms Rising.
Back on Monday!
with love,
L