Calls for eliminating tips and demanding a compensatory raise in cash wages issued forth frequently from culinary union spokespersons, especially during the Progressive Era.29 Food servers themselves, however, were divided over the issue, with the ranks of those interested in reforming the system thinning as tip income increased and public condemnation of tipping diminished. By 1945, according to the national union journal, most culinary workers did “not like the tipping system and freely complain[ed] about it…but many would not say a word lest it should be replaced by another system that would mean a financial loss to them.”30

[...] Because women's work was often de-valued and its skills rendered invisible, waitresses had more trouble raising the societal estimation of their worth than did their male co-workers.38 Nevertheless, through unionization, waitresses gained many of the privileges reserved for “skilled” workers. Their achievements demonstrate, as Anne Phillips and Barbara Taylor have pointed out, that “skill” is a flexible concept and varies according to the balance of power between employers and labor organizations.3

Many waitresses had always assented to sexual display and flirtation as an integral aspect of their work. Their acceptance of the sexual character of their work was rooted in their distinctive mores, but it also derived from their situation as service workers in an occupation in which their livelihood depended on attractiveness and allure. Denial was largely foreclosed as an option because, for many, their work took place in an increasingly sexualized environment. Waitresses walked a fine line: unlike middle-class women, they wanted to express their sexuality, but they sought to do so without losing control over the uses of that sexuality. They wanted to determine by whom and for what ends it was to be used.

Waitresses saw attractiveness, in part, as an achievement and a confirmation of their femininity. The avid support among waitresses for beauty contests is one demonstration of this attitude. Detroit's local was typical: forty-two women competed for the title of Queen of Detroit's Waitresses for the first time in 1939; these union-sponsored contests continued unabated into the 1960s. Mae Stoneman, long-time business manager for Waitresses’ Local 639 in Los Angeles, frequently described her local as “the one with the most beautiful waitresses of any local in the International.” In an employee bathing beauty contest appropriately sponsored by the Rose Royal Cheese Cake Company, four of the six winners were Local 639 members. “Local 639 has always cooperated with community interests that afford some recreational benefits to our members,” Stoneman maintained. Cafeteria Local 302 Women's Committee devoted a number of columns in the union paper to bathing beauty contests. In announcing the contest for Queen of the Trade Unions at the New York World's Fair, the committee exhorted, “C'mon, let's show them some of our 302 beauties.” The Women's Committee savored the subsequent triumph of 302 members: “This will silence forever those who say that the only girls that get active in trade unions are cranks or old maids.”73

Waitresses wanted their unions to function as social organizations. Chicago's local held open house three times a week, providing light refreshments and entertainment. A New York City waitress, interviewed in 1907, volunteered that the best thing about her union were the “sociables. Sometimes they have lectures with magic lantern pictures and it gives a girl somewhere to go evenings.”110 Female locals instituted annual balls as soon as they were chartered. San Francisco waitresses held yearly dances into the 1950s and used the money they raised for their sick and death benefit funds. These affairs brought a “a better feeling among the girls,” a Los Angeles waitress organizer reported, and they forged ties between waitress locals and the local labor movement. One female organizer relied on the annual waitress dance as a wedge to gain entry into male union meetings and garner support for organizing. Social events also helped engage the uncommitted rank and file and attract unorganized waitresses.111