[bumby]

>if the company can pay $15, they should pay $15

This doesn't hold unless you think profits should be driven to zero. Any profit would mean an additional wage being withheld. I may not understand the dynamic here, but my understanding is that tip laws ensure that if the employee comes in under $15, the company makes up the difference.

I've alluded to it a few times, but I think we disagree in that tipping is a quasi-voluntary tax. A tax is a fee paid to subsidize a service. That tax, in this case, subsidizes fare charges by reducing overhead labor costs. If you want to not tip, you should pay a higher fare because otherwise those who do tip are subsidizing your ride. I don't think it's unethical just because it's called a "tip" unless you assume people don't understand how the tipping system works. If your claim is it allows a corporation to make an unfair profit, I'm not sure I'm tracking the logic of that argument because the tax in this case is entirely voluntary. Where I have an ethical problem is when wages are suppressed so much that the public must subsidize employee wages in the form of government benefits. In that case, non-customers are subsidizing the company profits; since they are not consumers of that company, it makes it a compulsory tax to protect their profit. This is entirely different than a voluntary tax on those who use the service.

Personally, I would prefer tipping in general to be banned because it's a clunky, inefficient system. It's much more transparent and straightforward to just have a fair wage without all the game theory that comes along with a convoluted system of tipping.

[dheera]

> Personally, I would prefer tipping in general to be banned because it's a clunky, inefficient system. It's much more transparent and straightforward to just have a fair wage without all the game theory that comes along with a convoluted system of tipping.

100% agree with this.