Doha, January 2026
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At Rise Hospitality, we believe that great service starts with great people. As our venues continue to grow and welcome gue
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You ever think about how casually, easily, presumptively, frequently it is that women touch other women and get a little 🥹 about it?
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Diner Waitress, by Robert Maguire by Mike Licht
Via Flickr:
Sexy diner waitress, by illustrator Robert Maguire, for the paperback novel Counter Girl by Amy Harris
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ALTFinished pixelart commission for my buddy Batpunk, the waitresses at the “Adult Restaurant” chain Hefties where the staff has a bit more than meat on the bone uwö
Commissions are open: commiss.io/captainbragd
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Department of Labor recovers $124K in back wages, withheld tips, liquidated damages for 126 employees of restaurants in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont
Tito’s Taqueria also paid $12K in penalties for illegal tip violations
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division’s Northern New England District Office found Tito’s Taqueria, a counter service restaurant, illegally required employees at three locations to share a portion of their tips with managers and failed to pay workers time and one-half their regular rates of pay for hours over 40 in a workweek.
The Fair Labor Standards Act forbids owners and managers from keeping any portion of an employee’s tips for any purpose,
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EBAY: MarkOnParkWorld: “Twins of the Flight Deck” 1949 snapshot. Look-alike waitresses.
https://www.ebay.com/usr/markonparkworld
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“The strategies developed by the Waitresses Action Committee [WAC] were shaped by their astute analysis of the structural limitations on reaching a scattered and transient workforce that included many women who worked part time. A substantial group of “older” women, in their 30s and 40s, also had family responsibilities. The labour law regime, based on union locals representing a workplace or a group within a workplace, was not conducive to organizing; however, the WAC eschewed worksite organization for an occupational mobilization outside of the existing union structures. One problem, the WAC conceded in a letter to a Kingston waitress, was that waitressing was often a “filler” job for women between other jobs or in hard times, so “once a waitress, you are not always a waitress.” Even if women continued to do the job, they might move from one locale to another. Recognizing “how dangerous and difficult” it was to organize at the workplace, as well as women’s reluctance or inability to attend meetings that clashed with child care, the WAC developed alternative tactics: petitions, publicity, lobbying, and alliances with politicians, feminists, and a very wide array of social movements. “We never intended to make a big membership drive,” [Ellen] Agger wrote to a waitress in Waterloo near the end of the campaign; the WAC’s tactics reflected “who we are in ways that would reflect our own lack of time.”
The small Wages For Housework (WFH) and WAC instigating group tried to locate grassroots waitress supporters and raise public awareness, as well as secure endorsements from organizations to emphasize the breadth and interconnections of this workplace issue. They did not focus only on obvious allies; they approached Lynne Gordon, head of the ACSW, and Laura Sabia, a Tory, as well as more progressive groups. By 1977, the WAC’s list of supporters protesting the differential included legal reform groups and immigrant, feminist, lesbian, antipoverty, educational, social service, and labour organizations; they accrued 33 official endorsements. Given the WAC’s small numbers, this outreach was nothing short of astounding.
Most responses to the WAC indicated a shared concern about the ongoing economic fallout of cuts, inflation, and declining wages in women’s lives. The combined class and feminist message of the WAC appealed; a local antipoverty group offered its immediate support, promising to write to the government and noting that the issue spoke to “sole support moms,” likely because some women with dependents moved in and out of waitressing to try to make ends meet.
The class message was less appealing to some groups, including the politically cautious Ontario ACSW; it took a long time to create a lukewarm resolution of support. If an organization refused to endorse, as did CHAT (Community Homophile Association of Toronto), Agger followed up with further persuasion. If she encountered politicians gladhanding in public spaces, as she did with both NDP leader Stephen Lewis and Conservative Larry Grossman at the Bathurst Street United Church festival in the summer of 1977, she queried them on their views on the differential and waitresses’ wages.
The WAC worked the phones to raise public awareness, but it also circulated its brief, originally written for the provincial Department of Labour and Department of Industry and Tourism early in 1977. Any inquiry the committee got, out went the brief and the petition, titled “Money for Waitresses Is Money for All Women.” The brief was a tightly organized, well-argued, and convincing document that earned the WAC respect. A seven-page analysis, it covered a history of the tip differential, including the strong business lobby behind it, and the biased nature of that lobby’s selective comparative statistics drawn from other regions and the United States. It also exposed a secretive provincial government unwilling to publicly acknowledge what it was planning vis-à-vis the minimum wage.
The brief held that the tipping system should not be considered a wage but rather a payment for service that might or might not be paid, and it noted that tips subsidized employers, not workers, since they allowed owners to pay low wages – something Ministry of Labour researchers privately said too. Those hurt most by a growing differential, it showed, were those at the bottom of the workplace hierarchy in hospitality – women, sole support mothers, immigrants. Most waitresses made close to (if not only) the minimum wage; a
statistical appendix showed the wage gap between male and female workers in general and food servers in particular. Women and men were rewarded differently for their work, in part because of the gendered hierarchy of service labour, with men working in more prestigious locales, but wage differences were still striking. Although women made up the majority of the workforce, they earned at least a third less than men in the same job. Waitresses who had to support dependents, the WAC brief showed, were poised close to or below the poverty line.
Agger quoted waitresses interviewed in the press who pointed out that their wages were supporting families and that, even with tips, the money they earned “barely kept the wolves from the door.” The brief asked why waitressing was deemed a (low) minimum-wage job, and here, the views of WFH were clear: serving was considered women’s work that required no training, as it was an extension of their work in the home. Many women, moreover, took up waitressing as their only alternative to “wagelessness in the home.” Just as women in the home provide “cheap labour,” so did women and immigrants in serving jobs, with the latter always “with the gun of poverty to their heads.”
- Joan Sangster, “Waitresses in Action: Feminist Labour Protest in 1970s Ontario,” Labour/Le Travail 92 (Fall 2023), p. 29-31.
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Waitresses
Bruiseology
1983 Polydor
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Tracks:
01. A Girl’s Gotta Do
02. Make the Weather
03. Everything’s Wrong If My Hair Is Wrong
04. Luxury
05. Open City
06. Thinking about Sex Again
07. Bruiseology
08. Pleasure
09. Spin
10. They’re All out of Liquor, Let’s Find Another Party
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- Chris Butler
- Patty Donahue
- Billy Ficca
- Dan Klayman
- Mars Williams
- Tracy Wormworth
