Thomas Sutcliffe: Take a tip... end this patronising rip-off

The news that The Good Food guide had finally dispensed with dress code recommendations for restaurants was taken by many to mark an overdue democratisation of fine dining. No longer, it seems, do we have to fear being turned away by a haughty maître d' for turning up without a jacket, or, even worse, being handed a greasy regimental tie to loop implausibly around our polo-shirt.

And yet, while collar buttons are unloosed and jackets discarded in a fiesta of classless informality, restaurants still preserve a practice that is positively ancien regime in its combination of class condescension and caprice. I'm talking about tipping – which employers like to present as an indispensible incentive to keep the standards of service high, but which in many cases provides them with a means to dip into the pockets of both customer and staff simultaneously.

Later this week, the TGWU will hold a day of action over service charges, part of an ongoing campaign to make the rules that govern them more equitable and enforceable. They're not campaigning to do away with tipping altogether, only to plug some of the loopholes which have allowed employers to profit at the expense of workers on the lower rungs of the catering business.

The most glaring of these, Regulation 31 (e) of the National Minimum Wage Act, allows employers to count tips as part of the Minimum Pay Rate – while exempting them from the rules that apply to a contractual hourly rate. So, although the tips component helps nudge rates over the legal minimum, employers don't have to pay National Insurance on that part of an employee's wages or observe the usual rules about holiday and sick pay.

It doesn't help that the distribution of tips is rarely fair. Many employers make deductions from service charges to cover breakages or no-shows, and even the tronc system – in which the staff themselves administer the distribution of their tips – is open to influence, with some employers controlling how the troncmaster divides up the pie.

The fact that tips paid as a service charge or via a credit card are legally the property of the employer rather than the staff doesn't exactly discourage management from taking a cut – something you might like to think about next time you're keying a tip into one of those mobile pin-card machines. The faintly crestfallen look on your waiter's face as he or she explains that you don't have to find the right cash is probably there for a good reason.

The TGWU are only campaigning for the fair and transparent distribution of service charges among those who have notionally earned them ... but it isn't easy to see how the system is defensible at all. Why should anyone's earnings depend on the unreliable largesse of the customer – in the hope that the generous and open-handed will make up for the meagre tippers?

And if this is really regarded as a tool to improve service, the truth is that it is a blunt instrument aimed at the wrong people. If I get bad service in a restaurant I want to punish the proprietor ... not a badly paid footsoldier who may be struggling to compensate for the effects of understaffing or poor management.

In any case, decent service should be a bottom-line expectation – not a variable extra. We should follow the example of the French and incorporate service charges into every bill – and then ensure that waiting staff get a real minimum wage, not a dubious lash-up. Anything else tips in the wrong direction

Who's a pretty girl, then?

It was unnerving to see that the movie version of Sex and the City will feature four look-alike actresses who play Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda when they were young. Given that highly paid Hollywood actresses can get very snippy over who gets the best bikini for a Vanity Fair photo-shoot, the potential for temper tantrums would seem to be huge. After all, what's the best strategy when it comes to approving the younger you? Make sure you have the prettiest doppelganger, with the risk that you may look as if you've aged badly? Or lean on the producers to go for someone a bit lower down the looks scale so that audiences will be impressed by your autumnal ripening? And how young would be bearable?

* Nil nisi bonum and all that, but it was still a bit surprising to find coverage of Marcel Marceau's death so respectfully silent about the contemporary cultural standing of Bip, the regrettably influential white-faced clown he created as the vehicle for his art. It is possibly true, as our own correspondent stated, that Marceau was "the most loved and internationally admired of all French people" but it was also true that – qua clown – he was amongst the most reflexively reviled as well.

Bip was the inevitable visual shorthand for the wearisome pretensions of bad mime – with its insistence that gesture will always exceed the eloquence of language, which is only true if you want to say very trite things. It's easy to imagine a mimed funeral address: white-faced clown walks to podium, turns corners of his mouth down and screws his fists into his eyes in a "boo-hoo" motion. One hopes that in Marceau's case the mourners settle for the crudity of the spoken word.

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk