Someone may have asked you if you’d like to “join the X-men”, and referred you to this site. If he did, he respects your dedication to your job, and wants you to do better at it. He wants to help you make working conditions better for yourself, and himself.

If you’ve been asked to join, you’re making your living from tips. You also receive an hourly wage, but you know, and your employer knows, that the customers pay most of your salary. One major pizza delivery chain even has an online ordering feature which urges customers to tip the driver.

In short: they know, and it’s incorporated into their business model.

Getting organized

A traditional approach to unionization is doomed to failure. You and your coworkers are – at first glance – very easy to replace. There is a minimum level of competency required to do your job, of course, but the real value of an employee in your field is only seen by the person who pays that employee most of his money: the customer. It is the customer that organization efforts must be directed at.

The tactics used to organize and demand better treatment from customers may be shocking to the general public, and provoke widespread outrage. This is not necessarily a bad thing. A national dialogue on the treatment of tipped workers is long overdue.

In meantime, we can start working on those tactics.

The first steps

We’ll assume you’re good at your job, and that you’re selective about who you invite to join the X-men. Now it’s time for you to and your X-men coworkers to begin “X-listing” (blacklisting) customers who don’t hold up their end of the bargain.

These tactics apply primarily to delivery drivers, because it’s easy to share addresses or phone numbers that need to be X-listed. As technology advances, gadgets like Google Glasses will allow other kinds of tipped workers to capture customers’ biometric information and share it nationwide. In the very near future, bad customers will get lousy service everywhere they go.