In nineteenth-century restaurants and cafés, customers’ tips provided the income of an increasing number of waiters and waitresses. Not only did employers refrain from paying serving staff a fixed wage, the latter had to share their employers’ general expenses, while some even had to pay a fee for the privilege of working. Exploring newspapers, pamphlets, reports, and union sources, the article discusses in a comparative way how and why these practices were deployed in Amsterdam, Brussels, Vienna, London, and French and German cities. As a result of the overcrowding of the labour market in hospitality, hiring workers became not only a cost-free transaction, it even developed into a source of income. Serving staff paid for the opportunity to collect tips, even if their increasing number reduced individual income. However, as a result of the tipping system, such staff often managed to secure higher “wages” than they would normally have earned.

Working conditions and labour unrest among service employees in the hotel and restaurant sector have, for a long time, have not been at the centre of attention of labour historians, especially in Italy. However, from the late nineteenth century a considerable number of cooks and waiters in Italian cities began to organize in order to improve their working conditions and to create alternative, cost-free forms of employment. From the early twentieth century, the trade unions of the employees of hotels and restaurants (grouped together in a National Federation in 1907) attempted to achieve these goals by means of strikes and demonstrations, some of them remarkably militant. Using a broad range of primary sources and quantitative data, this paper will first describe the characteristics of the working conditions of workers in hotels and restaurants in Italy; second, it will analyse the evolution of organizations, demands, and strike action by these staff from the beginning of the twentieth century to the advent of fascism. Distinguishing two waves of mobilization (1902−1907/1908 and 1919−1920), this paper aims, firstly, to highlight the similarities and differences between union actions by hotel and restaurant employees, on the one hand, and those of other workers on the other. Secondly, it focuses on the ways that the strikes induced serving staff to feel like “real” workers in terms of the outlook and behaviour of industrial workers.

Between 1957 and 1984, Belgian consumers were represented by two comparative testing organizations: Test-Achats and the Union Féminine pour l’Information et la Défense du Consommateur. These two consumer organizations were fundamentally dissimilar in terms of their staff, their audience, and their ideological framing of consumer interests. Only the “politically independent” Test-Achats joined the International Organization of Consumer Unions (IOCU), even though it was initially smaller and weaker than the Union Féminine, the social-democratic alternative for consumers. A comparative analysis of Belgian organized consumerism reveals how, after 1957, the consumer interest was gradually reframed to fit a hegemonic definition. A private and commercial model of consumer representation was actively promoted over and against a public model through a complex transatlantic dialogue. Moreover, I argue that the international connections – or lack thereof – of the two organizations are essential to explain their success (or failure). The diffusion of organized consumerism during the 1950s and 1960s was financially and ideologically connected with the Keynesian-Fordist regulatory framework. The attack on embedded liberalism in the late 1970s thus posed serious challenges. Mapping the choices and trajectories of Belgian consumer activists in an international context helps us to understand these challenges better.