2025 Theses Master's

Tipped Wages for Housework: A Marxist Feminist Analysis of Front of House Restaurant Work

Hurtado, Olivia

What much philosophy about labor lacks is the perspective of those who actually perform the labor. As a result, we often talk about labor in generalizations unhelpful to organizing, petitioning, or legislating meaningful change.

This paper locates the particular issues faced by a particular group of laborers, front of house tipped wage restaurant workers, through analysis of oral history interviews with two bartenders in a New York City Restaurant rooted in the framing of their job as derivative of the feminized tradition of unpaid housework.