Shortly before opening, Casa Bonita’s new owners Matt Stone and Trey Parker decided to eliminate tipping and instead pay workers a flat wage of $30 per hour.
Now I could be wrong, but getting a an hourly wage as a restaurant worker is FAR better than relying on tips. I feel like either workers in this situation are too obsessed with tips or there’s huge context missing.
We also don't even know if it's the workers that want this. All we are being shown is a petition that has ~5k signatures on it, despite the restaurant only having 256 employees according to the article. And in the second to last line of the article, we are told this:
If we can only find 2 people that are upset with the policy despite having a petition with thousands of signatures, then I think it's safe to conclude that the people supporting the petition and the people working at the restaurant don't overlap very much.
Which makes sense, because if the workers were united on this issue and were serious about forcing their boss to make a change to employment policy, then they would be passing around union election cards instead of sharing a petition and getting signatures of people who don't even work at the restaurant. A union has real leverage to force a business to make policy changes, a petition doesn't.
It doesn't make sense for workers to try to change a policy like this through a petition, so the only likely reason for a petition like this to exist is so that media outlets like this can have a pretext to write an article about how seemingly unpopular this policy is in order to manufacture consent against demands for similar policies in the wider industry. A petition is great for this kind of hit job, because it focuses solely on the apparent disapproval of whoever they could find that was willing to sign. A petition doesn't give you any data on how many people approve of the new policy relative to the disapproval rate, a petition doesn't give you any information on how many people declined to sign, a petition doesn't give you information where this disapproval is coming from (such as from the workers themselves or some outside source), and as such writing an article about a petition doesn't present you with any contradicting data that might undermine the narrative you're trying to sell.
I am under no impression that this petition represents genuine grievances and demands from the workers themselves, and rather that it is likely the product of some astroturfing effort from other business owners and executives in the industry who have a vested interest in discouraging this policy from becoming commonplace/industry standard.
Excellent points!