“The original workers that were not paid anything by their employers were newly freed slaves,” she tells Quartz. “This whole concept of not paying them anything and letting them live on tips carried over from slavery.”
Many Americans in post-slavery America initially resisted tipping, a custom that originated with European aristocrats. To tip was patronizing, Jayaraman writes in her book; it was seen as “despicable, undemocratic and wholly un-American.”
But the idea that anyone who accepted tips was in a lower class held on into the early 20th century. Jayaraman quotes an American reporter, John Speed, who reflected on the tipping system in 1902 while traveling to the North for the first time. His words underscore the inherent racism to tipping: “I had never known any but negro servants. Negroes takes tips, of course; one expects that of them—it is a token of their inferiority. But to give money to a white man was embarrassing to me.”
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