Sea Wolf’s Newly Unionized Bakers Are Now Accepting Tips

Not long after Jesse and Kit Schumann started Sea Wolf, they stopped accepting tips at their bakery. They opened their brick-and-mortar on Stone Way in 2016, at a time when the food world was debating the merits (or demerits) of tipping as a practice. Anti-tip advocates argued that tipping exacerbated racial inequality and pay disparities between the front and back of house, worsened sexual harassment for women servers, and enabled wage theft. 

The Schumann brothers saw some of this first-hand during their careers in the service industry. “It left a real sour taste in our mouths,” says Kit. “We decided to take a philosophical stand and say that we wanted to demonstrate that a business could pay their staff higher than minimum wage, provide career opportunities, provide good benefits, and be a successful business.”

Now, in a reversal nearly a decade later, Sea Wolf is once again accepting tips, because the newly unionized workers demanded them.

The bakery’s more than 40 workers unionized last year as part of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 3000, which consists mainly of grocery store and healthcare workers. Higher pay was a primary issue for the Sea Wolf Bakers Union, but as negotiations with the Schumanns progressed, the owners took the unusual step of opening the business’s books to show them that Sea Wolf weren’t doing well enough financially to give the employees much in the way of raises. 

“It made it very clear to us that they were not going to be able to afford to give us the wages that we were asking for,” says Miller Hammond, a Sea Wolf barista who was on the union bargaining committee. “We’re looking at the numbers and we’re like, ‘Well, if we want to be paid more, the money is going to have to come from somewhere.’ So we worked together to come up with a tipping policy.”

The policy the union settled on is a tip pool that spreads the wages evenly among all hourly workers based on how much they worked in a given week. “If somebody can’t work on a Saturday, which is just going to be your biggest tipping day, then you still get the same amount of tips per hour that everybody else is getting,” Hammond says.

Sea Wolf’s newly adopted policy follows the pattern of some restaurants around the country that have attempted to eliminate tipping, like Danny Meyer’s famed Union Square Hospitality Group, only to run into some economic difficulties. It’s hard for restaurants (which typically have thin profit margins) to pay servers as much as they’d make with tips; if they raise prices to make up the difference, customers often balk. After a few years touting his “hospitality included” model, Meyer had to switch back to allowing tips, and now says tipping at restaurants is “deeply embedded in American culture.”

As of this year, Seattle has no “tip credit,” meaning the minimum wage for tipped and untipped workers is the same $20.76 — one of the highest minimum wages in the country. But Seattle also has one of the country’s highest costs of living, driven in part by the price of housing, meaning service workers are still feeling pinched. 

“This is a really, really expensive city to live in. And a lot of the time wages in food service, customer service, they just are not going to cut it,” says Hammond.

That reality is why the Schumanns agreed to tipping, despite their longstanding opposition to the practice. “As someone who is sympathetic to being a human living in Seattle, it’s pretty hard to say that [tipping] isn’t something you should consider,” says Kit. “I don’t want to make an ideological stand when you could be providing a material benefit to your team.”

The Sea Wolf Bakers Union isn’t the only service worker union to see tips as a way to “bridge that gap between your base wage and a livable wage,” as Hammond puts it. Earlier this year, employees at Renee Erickson’s well-known Sea Creatures group unionized, primarily to protest management replacing a tip pooling arrangement with a service charge model, which they say reduces many workers’ wages. 

A few weeks into the new era of tipping at Sea Wolf, it seems to be going well. Kit says that he’s gotten a lot of emails from customers about it, many of them asking whether tips meant lower prices (short answer: no). But “coming out of the union negotiation,” he says, he feels “like everyone in the bakery is a little happier and everyone is communicating a little bit more openly.”

Hammond says that he’s heard from his coworkers that the response from customers confronted by the new tipping screen has been “mixed,” but largely positive. “Based on what I have witnessed firsthand, it’s been pretty successful and well-received at the bakery,” he says. “People are excited for us … Even before tipping was implemented, they would ask, ‘Oh, where can I leave a tip?’”