Excerpt from the article:
Schenker says that after his years in the service industry, he has watched tipping evolve into a major part of his pay.
“If there is some means of tipping that’s available to you, that should signal to you that workers there aren’t being paid enough,” says Schenker. “Tipping is sort of an acknowledgment of that fact.”
To Schenker, customers who don’t tip are not understanding that businesses treat tips as a baked-in part of workers’ wages.
“They subsidize lower prices by paying employees less,” he says. “If you aren’t tipping, you are taking advantage of that labor.”
He was so close… Especially for someone who says himself does not make much money.
At a glance, this makes sense. As a worker, I get compensated for my work directly by the total of customers I serve.
In practice, however, tipping being optional means that there will always be people who tip less than is appropriate, or not at all. I would guess that it’s more likely for those undertippers to be people who are disconnected with the reality of being a service worker who depends on tips, e.g., people who are already wealthy. Which means that the livelihood of tipped workers depends more on less wealthy people (those who have an understanding of the position the service worker is in).
The effect here is that less wealthy customers pay more for their services, and more wealthy customers pay less. Yet another shifting of wealth from the poor to the rich.
Elimination of tipping brings this into a fairer (though still not completely fair) balance.