Richard Florida interviews Zeynep Ton– “Too many service companies — and too many Americans, for that matter — buy into the line of thinking that the only way for restaurants, retail, and other service companies to profit is to pay the lowest possible wages. As she explains, “in service industries, succeeding at the expense of employees and at the expense of customers often go together.”

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The world’s leading high-performance manufacturing companies already pay their workers more in return for tapping their knowledge and ideas to improve processes. Ton shows that even in supposedly low-skill service sector work, higher wages are the key to greater employee engagement, better customer service, higher productivity, and a better bottom line.”