Those Americans who think this is ok and therefore allow the practice to continue have the following justifications: 1. It's been this way for a while, and cha

Those Americans who think this is ok and therefore allow the practice to continue have the following justifications: 1. It's been this way for a while, and change is bad 2. If restaurants were forced to increase wages, prices of food would go up 3. Service workers like waiters are less-than, and don't deserve to make that much money 4. There are restaurants that pay well on top of tips: all the servers who don't like working at the bad paying restaurants can just leave their jobs and go work there 5. The only way to motivate good service is to extract it at the threat of poverty. American tipping culture thus extracts excellent service. 6. If the restaurants have to pay more, they'll instead fire workers, and make the remainders worker harder and more hours These are points I've been told in person by actual Americans, so I don't think "strawman" is a valid accusation here. I have my personal feelings about each one: 1. changing bad things to good, is good 2. Price of food may go up, but that's ok if it means workers get paid fair wages. If the prices go too high presumably people won't go to those restaurants, and the restaurant will bring prices back down. I do personally believe though that many restaurant owners will be willing to stick to too-high prices to the death of the restaurant rather than cut their own personal profits of the place. That's also ok with me though. 3. Every person deserve a living wage. 4. There aren't enough of the magical good-paying jobs, especially not local to current ones. 5. Money is actually a poor motivator, as any sales team lead would tell you. Also, it's unethical to try to extract labor at the knife-point of poverty. Also, people are nice to me in countries that don't have tipping culture, probably because I'm nice to them, so it's not a truism that people only work hard if you dangle the carrot of a tip in front of them. 6. This is almost certainly true, but it's not a reason to not force restaurants to pay more. Other labor protections should also be implemented.