Why you shouldn’t tip at this restaurant

Black Star restaurant and micro-brewery in Austin Texas is run as a co-op with a workers assembly. That means workers make a decent wage, have health benefits, and no one wants a tip.

The Toronto Star:

Most waiters and waitresses rely on their tips to supplement their hourly salary. But not so the staff at Black Star Co-op in Austin, Texas. There the tip jar isn’t anywhere to be seen.

That’s because the restaurant pub and microbrewery pays its staff what it calls a “living wage” and also pays for health care.

Black Star Co-op is one of the first microbreweries in the United States to use a co-op model to set up a business. A restaurant and bar in Milwaukee known as the Riverwest Public House also uses it and a brew pub in Seattle is also looking at it.

The co-operative at Black Star has a nine person board of directors who are picked from a “members’ assembly.”

The board sets general policies for the co-op but it is the employees themselves through the “workers’ assembly” who implement them, including the policy of a living wage for staff – calculated at $16 an hour – and health care. The workers’ assembly appoints a liaison member to the board.

What’s even more unusual is employees manage themselves. They make up what is known as the worker’s assembly and after a year on staff take on duties of a manager. For the first three months they’re on staff they earn $12 an hour, explained Wochner, but after that their salary goes up to $16 an hour. They also can receive bonuses.

The idea behind the co-op was simple: “We wanted to transform how things are done,” said Wochner. The good thing about co-ops is that “they’re extremely local and sustainable. It won’t close because one or two people retire.

“The co-op movement is a great movement for society,” he said. After the Occupy Movement and the cry for a third way, Wochner couldn’t help but wonder if the co-op example Black Star was using wasn’t that other option. “Co-ops are inherently tied to their memberships and in a more general sense to their stakeholders.

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