The Antichristian Phenomenon

I debated whether or not to put this under the DC series but decided against it. This is less a “debunking” or awareness article and more of a ramble. As you may or may or not know, I work a part time customer service oriented job during the summer. This is something I discovered, much to my displeasure.

As most who know me can tell you, during the school year I am a full time student and monitor in the school’s computer lab. I overload myself with credits, study hard, and so on. However, I attend a school that is far away from my hometown and have had to be at home during the past two summers. The job market there is tight, and there aren’t many positions available for an unskilled college student, so I waitress at a family-friendly homestyle restaurant just off I-77. I hate my job, it drives me to near-clinical depression after about a month, destroys my appetite, and fuels my hatred for humans more than anything, but there’s nothing else for me to do for only three months, believe me, I’ve looked. Regardless, its a paycheck, and actually getting cash tips are nice. (I admit that I am not very good at my job either… its hard to be a misanthropic waitress! :P)

In the United States, all employees are covered under a law called Equal Opportunity. If you take a little time to read through the Equal Opportunity laws, you will see that it is illegal to discriminate based on age, gender, race, religion, nationality, and so on. As an employer, you can not refuse employment, promotions, rate of pay, and so on, to someone based on these characteristics. I personally agree with the fundamental principle of this law, not just because it technically benefits me, but because I find it unethical to take an uncontrollable characteristic such as gender or country of origin or a deeply personal choice such as religion into a workplace that theoretically should value productivity, merit, and skill, unless for some reason one of these factors does affect the actual work to be done. I do disagree with some of the results, lawsuits, and applications surrounding EO and those taking advantage of it, but that matters little to my point and happens to a lot of laws and commissions, anyway.

Tonight I realized that as a tipped employee, I am not really covered under EO. In terms of treatment by management and co-workers as well as my base pay, I am… but a tipped employee in the United States relies on the customer to provide over half their pay rate. Minimum wage in my state is 7USD/hr (4.50 EUR), but because tipped employees get… tips… it is significantly less: 3.50USD/hr (2.25 EUR). What this means ultimately is that on my paycheck I will receive my base pay plus any tips from credit cards, and every night I will walk out with the other half of my pay as cash in my hands, usually a whole lot of one dollar bills. At my restaurant, usually a waitress can expect to make a little over minimum wage and at better, so ultimately the majority of my pay is in the customer’s hands. The customer is not bound legally by EO. They may ethically agree with it and follow it, but they don’t have to… and there’s no way to enforce a blatant EO violation in terms of tips.

I am going to address the implications of this in terms of religion, specifically Christianity based on my regional demographics, consumer trends, and the nature of this website, but keep in mind that any of the things that are supposedly covered under EO can be inserted. Also, when I use the word “discrimination”, I am not referring to some sort of extreme treatment, but simply a measurable preference. I don’t like using that word but I can’t think of anything better.

Now, working in a family restaurant in the midwest United States, one can expect that the majority of clients I service will be Christian. We are a popular restaurant for the church crowd on Sundays and Wednesday nights, and the majority of standard citizens in the area are Christian. This is not an issue for me personally, I am paid to service clients, and if I do my job well, I am rewarded accordingly by them in the form of a good tip (theoretically). I just do my job. However, today I had a 16-top Christian youth group en route to some homeless shelter project. They weren’t a bad table, they were well behaved, and did leave me a decent enough tip. When they left, I wondered if they would have left so much if they had known that I was a vehement Anti-Christian. If they had any idea that I thought their religion was a pile of lies, hated and rejected to the core of my being everything they held dear to their innocent little hearts, would they have, could they have, in good faith taken a dollar out of their pocket, and lain it on the table? This may be speculation, but I’m not sure they would have. Despite their religions teachings, Christians are not known among the nonreligious for their warm and generous hearts [1. Murder] [2. Assaulting Atheists Verbally] [3. Assaulting Atheists Physically] [4. Opposing, sometimes violently, what happens in the bedrooms of two consenting adults].

Granted, in my work, we generally do not have enough time to sit down with customers and discuss the finer points of religion and politics, so the gap between the goal and actuality of EO in terms of religion for me is not readily visible as it might be for say, a black waitress working in a southern town with a well-attended KKK. However, it does lead me to speculation, and I don’t like my conclusions. What if… I somehow had a visible affirmation of my beliefs, like earrings, tattoo, ring? What if… they asked me whether I accepted Jesus (you KNOW some Christians are that bold, some of them even pray loudly after you put the food on their table)? What if… one of the other waitresses made a comment they overheard? Etc, etc. Technically if something like that happened, and they tipped me less or stiffed me as a result, it would be religious discrimination, liable for a lawsuit under EO. However, there is no way to prove religion to be the reason, all they’d have to say is that I gave them unsatisfactory service. They win, end of story, the end.

~(Its also interesting to observe how many little pamphlets and tracts my friend and I have found on our tables with our tip, usually a smaller one as though the pamphlet was equivalent to a dollar or so. The last one I got looked like a real estate advertisement…)~

The other thing I thought of here is sort of reverse discrimination. What if… I was wearing cross earrings, or another affirmation of belief in Christianity? Would they (and others I have waited on) have tipped me more? Not the direct action of wearing the earrings, thats absurd, but the implication that I too believe what they do, am a moral person as a result, that I am an upstanding Christian and so on. Honestly, If I had a waitress that was wearing a necklace with the American Atheist logo or Mjolnir, I would probably tip them more, so its not out of the question to presume that others might think the same way. EO is supposed to apply in both directions.

I’ve come up with a sort of experiment to test this hypothesis. What I would do is use the few elements of my uniform that are expressive to display crosses or crucifixes for a few weeks, then perhaps a pentagram or something for another few weeks, then count the tip percentage difference. It would be an interesting way to see if my speculations are merely speculation or actual reflections of human behavior, but I could never ethically do it myself as it would require wearing a visible affirmation of Christianity. It also would need more participants, a variety of locations, and a greater period of time to actually prove anything, but I do believe my reverse-discrimination theory would prove to be correct — tipped
employees displaying affirmations of a certain religion in an area heavily populated by that religion will make more tips than employees displaying affirmations of another religion or no religious display at all.

I wish I had the means to test this. The resulting data could be incredibly interesting.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 5:11 am and is filed under Culture, SocioPolitical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.