Donald Trump’s tax break on tips has a populist sheen, but who benefits most by keeping America’s odd system in place? And Kathryn Schulz puts yesterday’s earthquake and tsunami warnings in context. Plus:

• How the Israeli right explains the Gaza aid disaster
• Brazil is standing up to Trump
• Was the Renaissance real?

Eyal Press
A contributing writer on subjects including social inequality, labor, and workplace conditions.

You might think, as I once did, that the point of tipping is to compensate servers, bartenders, and other workers for their labor. But the real function of tipping, as the economist Robert Reich explained to me this year, is to subsidize employers—including some of the largest restaurant chains in the country—for the poverty wages they pay their workers, who in many states receive just $2.13 an hour rather than the regular minimum wage.

If you weren’t aware of this, you can thank the National Restaurant Association, a powerful industry lobby and the subject of a story I’ve written for this week’s issue. Known to many labor advocates as “the other N.R.A.,” the lobby, which represents restaurant owners and has partner organizations in all fifty states, insists that forcing workers to rely on tips benefits both restaurant proprietors and their employees. Servers can “bring home a really impressive paycheck,” Sean Kennedy, the lobby’s executive vice-president of public affairs, told me. But as I discovered in my reporting, the data that the lobby disseminates about what tipped workers earn sometimes doesn’t match what economists and the Bureau of Labor Statistics have found. The poverty rate among these workers is more than double the rate of other employees. Tipped workers are also more likely to rely on food stamps and other forms of federal assistance.

Restaurant employees have been in the news a lot lately, owing to Donald Trump’s proposal to eliminate federal taxes on tips. As I note in my article, the President’s plan, though often described as “populist,” won’t help the lowest paid tipped workers, nearly forty per cent of whom don’t make enough money to pay federal income taxes. And it won’t cost the owners of restaurants and hotels a penny, which is perhaps why Trump, himself a member of this ownership class, has embraced the idea—and why the N.R.A. supports it as well.

Read the story »

The fiercest defenders of Netanyahu’s war in Gaza continue to insist that Palestinians aren’t starving. Isaac Chotiner speaks to Amit Segal, the chief political correspondent for Israel’s Channel 12. Read the interview »

An 8.8-magnitude earthquake hit off the coast of Russia, prompting tsunami warnings and evacuation orders in Hawaii and across much of the West Coast. We called up Kathryn Schulz, a staff writer who, back in 2015, famously warned of “the really big one”—a terrifying, catastrophic quake that scientists predict will someday devastate the Pacific Northwest.

How bad was this particular earthquake?

Kathryn Schulz: By the metrics that I think most people care about, the answer is, mercifully, not that bad. By great good fortune, it took place in a region that is both relatively depopulated and has a pretty decent level of earthquake preparedness. My understanding is that so far, there’s been no loss of life, which is, of course, the most important thing.

On the other hand, an 8.8 earthquake is a huge earthquake. It is one of the largest known earthquakes in the world.

How did it compare with the “really big one”?

Structurally, they’re similar earthquakes. This one happened along the Ring of Fire, meaning it is part of the same broad global geological region that is prone to these enormous earthquakes. It was a subduction-zone earthquake, so mechanically—geophysically—it’s very similar.

But, in all the respects that matter, they’re very different. The earthquake scale is logarithmic, so the difference between a magnitude 8.8 earthquake and a magnitude 9.0 earthquake—which is not even the far end of what we can reasonably anticipate in a full-margin rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone—is really significant. A 9.0 magnitude earthquake would be almost twice as strong as what just happened. And, tragically, the Pacific Northwest is both much more populous and much less prepared for this kind of earthquake.

For more on the looming earthquake, read Schulz’s 2015 feature »

P.S. Do you tip the cashier when all she’s done is ring up your salad? As Zach Helfand has reported, tipping is not just a labor-justice issue, but also a matter of etiquette, expectation, and, sometimes, utter confusion.