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With a new law in place, all sides are claiming victory in the tipping wars
From https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2018/03/22/under-the-spending-bill-restaurant-owners-could-be-barred-from-taking-servers-tips/?utm_term=.4899de1965b3
Owners and managers won’t be able to dip into server tips under the new law signed by President Trump on Friday. (Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg News)
With a new law in place, all sides are claiming victory in the tipping wars
By Tim Carman March 23 at 7:34 PM
This story has been updated.
Tucked into Congress’s 2,200-plus-page omnibus spending bill are a few paragraphs that will prohibit restaurant owners from sharing server tips with supervisors, managers and themselves. But the provision will also allow employers, in some circumstances, to share tips with dishwashers, cooks and other back-of-the-house employees who have traditionally been underpaid compared with their counterparts in the dining room.
Both sides in the tipping wars are claiming victory: worker advocates, who see the provision as a bipartisan rebuke to a proposed Labor Department rule last year that could have legalized a practice now considered wage theft under the law, and the National Restaurant Association, which had been pushing to rescind a 2011 regulation that prohibited tip pooling for back-of-the-house employees in all circumstances.
Signed into law Friday by President Trump as part of the $1.3 trillion spending deal, the new provision gives the restaurant association what it says it wanted all along in its ongoing lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Labor: the freedom for employers to establish pools to share server tips with other hourly workers in the restaurant, especially low-paid line cooks and dishwashers. The idea is that the extra cash will help owners retain back-of-the-house employees and balance the income disparities between line cooks and dishwashers (often Latino) and servers and bartenders (frequently white).
The new law specifically prohibits owners, supervisors and managers from taking a cut of the tips.
...
By Tim Carman March 23 at 7:34 PM
This story has been updated.
Tucked into Congress’s 2,200-plus-page omnibus spending bill are a few paragraphs that will prohibit restaurant owners from sharing server tips with supervisors, managers and themselves. But the provision will also allow employers, in some circumstances, to share tips with dishwashers, cooks and other back-of-the-house employees who have traditionally been underpaid compared with their counterparts in the dining room.
Both sides in the tipping wars are claiming victory: worker advocates, who see the provision as a bipartisan rebuke to a proposed Labor Department rule last year that could have legalized a practice now considered wage theft under the law, and the National Restaurant Association, which had been pushing to rescind a 2011 regulation that prohibited tip pooling for back-of-the-house employees in all circumstances.
Signed into law Friday by President Trump as part of the $1.3 trillion spending deal, the new provision gives the restaurant association what it says it wanted all along in its ongoing lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Labor: the freedom for employers to establish pools to share server tips with other hourly workers in the restaurant, especially low-paid line cooks and dishwashers. The idea is that the extra cash will help owners retain back-of-the-house employees and balance the income disparities between line cooks and dishwashers (often Latino) and servers and bartenders (frequently white).
The new law specifically prohibits owners, supervisors and managers from taking a cut of the tips.
...
More at link
2 replies
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From https://www.vox.com/explainers/2018/3/21/17101260/trump-labor-department-tip-rule
Helen Richardson/The Denver Post via Getty Images
The omnibus bill blocks a Trump rule that would allow bosses to keep workers’ tips
By Alexia Fernández Campbell
Updated Mar 22, 2018, 2:05pm EDT
House Republicans passed a spending bill Thursday that includes an important amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. It bars employers from keeping tips earned by workers.
The text, written by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), was added to the bill to block a proposed Trump administration rule that would have allowed employers to pocket the tips of millions of workers — a move that could cost service workers $5.8 billion a year in lost tips.
The amendment would soften the blow of the new tipping rule the Department of Labor (DOL) is developing. The rule, which the agency proposed in December, would repeal an Obama-era regulation that made official what had been the common view for decades: that tips are the sole property of the workers who earn them. It would essentially allow employers to share their workers’ tips with other staff, or keep tips for themselves, provided they pay workers the full minimum wage. The provision in the spending bill would prevent employers from pocketing the tips, but would not stop them from pooling tips earned by servers to share with non-tipped employees.
...
But even if it does pass, the amendment wouldn’t completely void the Labor Department’s proposed tipping rule. The rule would still allow employers to share a worker’s tips with a larger pool of workers if they are paid the full minimum wage. That would immediately effect workers in at least seven states — including Nevada and Arizona — that already require employers to pay tipped workers the full minimum wage. (Under federal law, the minimum wage for tipped workers is only $2.13; the full minimum wage is $7.25.)
...
By Alexia Fernández Campbell
Updated Mar 22, 2018, 2:05pm EDT
House Republicans passed a spending bill Thursday that includes an important amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. It bars employers from keeping tips earned by workers.
The text, written by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), was added to the bill to block a proposed Trump administration rule that would have allowed employers to pocket the tips of millions of workers — a move that could cost service workers $5.8 billion a year in lost tips.
The amendment would soften the blow of the new tipping rule the Department of Labor (DOL) is developing. The rule, which the agency proposed in December, would repeal an Obama-era regulation that made official what had been the common view for decades: that tips are the sole property of the workers who earn them. It would essentially allow employers to share their workers’ tips with other staff, or keep tips for themselves, provided they pay workers the full minimum wage. The provision in the spending bill would prevent employers from pocketing the tips, but would not stop them from pooling tips earned by servers to share with non-tipped employees.
...
But even if it does pass, the amendment wouldn’t completely void the Labor Department’s proposed tipping rule. The rule would still allow employers to share a worker’s tips with a larger pool of workers if they are paid the full minimum wage. That would immediately effect workers in at least seven states — including Nevada and Arizona — that already require employers to pay tipped workers the full minimum wage. (Under federal law, the minimum wage for tipped workers is only $2.13; the full minimum wage is $7.25.)
...
More at link.
