Years ago I worked as a maître d’ in a big restaurant on the Upper West Side of New York. It was a busy place, a good place to be a waiter. High turnover, comfortably wealthy clientele, lots of dates to impress. As far as I can remember there was no minimum wage then; the wages were minimal. The waiters lived on their tips. There was no service charge but Americans give a lot, about 25% rounded up.

One busy Saturday a man out with his girlfriend paid the bill and left a pocketful of change on the table. The waiter followed the man into the street and flung it in his face. The restaurant watched through the window. When the waiter returned there was a ripple of applause. I was astonished and exhilarated. I came from a country where servants were servile and didn’t make eye contact. In London, if a waiter had exhibited that sort of confidence and pride, he’d have been fired on the spot.

Last week a chain of restaurants announced that it’s going to drop the 12.5% service charge from the bill. This is likely to set a trend. These are hard times for the catering industry. Trade is down, lunches are dead, Mondays are dead, liquor sales are parched. For the first time in 20 years, diners are looking at prices before ingredients. One celebrity chef owes his butcher £500,000. Another is offering his restaurant to anyone who’ll take on the debt.

Cutting the service charge may seem like a hospitable gift, but there are those who fear the move will in fact penalise the staff. That the English have to be bullied into tipping. That they are, by nature, parsimonious. That it has to be opt out rather than opt in, like organ donor cards. But it’s not as simple as that. Dropping the automatic service charge isn’t the restaurant altruism it appears: it’s a response to a change in the rules.

It has just become law that restaurants can no longer use the service charge to make up the minimum wage. The tip on the bill, you see, wasn’t always what the customer thought it was. It was regularly used to make up wages, offset management overheads, pay for breakages, flowers, taxis, laundry and unpaid bills. Now the rules have changed it has become annoying and expensive to administer. A fixed service charge on a credit card payment means restaurants have to set up a separate bank account and get the money back to the staff. The management can’t take any of it any more, so it’s easiest simply to dump it and appear to be passing on a saving to the customer.

This newspaper has campaigned for years to get the duplicitous and immoral practice of using tips for wages made illegal and finally it has been done. So a little pat on the back for us. But every time I wrote about the service charge, which I did to the point of tedium, restaurateurs and managers would tug my sleeve and with easy, clubbable smiles and reasonable, plummy tones, point out that I was being terribly naive about the business. That I didn’t understand the economics and the margins and the problems of the staff, the theft, the absenteeism, the languages, the training and the one thousand and one crosses that the hospitality business had to bear just to microwave a chicken. And pour a glass of Algerian claret.

My romantic and misplaced challenge of the service charge arrangement, the restaurateurs and managers said, would actually cost waiters money. I was hurting the very people I meant to help. But every single letter I got from a waiter — and there were many — was filled with humiliation and stories of cynical exploitation, of bullying and theft. Not one said that using the service charge to make up their pay was fair, or made them better off, or protected their jobs.

Every small step to improve the conditions of the lowest paid has always been met with these smiling, reasonable, well-fed voices muttering that it would cost jobs, make conditions worse. Every single one was supposed to harm working people. Stopping children working down mines or sending them up chimneys was do-gooding interference in the market and would cost families.

Business still argues this about sweatshops in the developing world. In fact it’s what slave owners argued about slavery: the slaves would suffer most from its abolition. Employment law hobbles resentfully into the 21st century. Our attitudes to unskilled, low-paid workers remain rooted in the 19th. Waiters are generally young immigrants with the least access not just to legal and union help, but also the support of families and white-collar friends.

The first and easiest way to make savings in the catering business is to cut back on waiters and dishwashers, make permanent jobs temporary, turn full-time into part-time. But the big change that needs to be made isn’t financial, it’s social: how we see and treat those who serve us. In New York the waiters had confidence and self-belief. One said to me: “I serve food. I’m not a servant.”

In England waiting is seen as a loser’s job or the refuge of grateful economic migrants. In America it’s what everyone does to get on, a first step to success. Waiting there is a hyphenated trade: waiter-actor, waiter-entrepreneur.

For most restaurants the biggest drain on resources is the owner sitting at the bar. Owners pay themselves way too much and make precious little difference to the running of the business.

So, now the automatic service charge is gone, the rule on tipping remains the same: always tip, always in cash, about 15% of the bill, rounded up. The tip isn’t just for the staff, it’s for yourself, for your digestion, a deposit in the karma bank. It’s politeness and it’s kindness and you should always say thank you.

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