Labor Department leadership scrubbed an unfavorable internal analysis from a new tip pooling proposal, shielding the public from estimates that showed employees could lose out on billions of dollars in gratuities, four current and former DOL sources tell Bloomberg Law.When most people tip their server, they're rewarding that person for their service. The restaurant owner, previously, was supposed to pay the cooks and the rest of the staff.
The agency shelved the economic analysis, compiled by DOL staff, from a December proposal to scrap an Obama administration rule. The proposal would permit tip pooling arrangements that involve restaurant servers and other workers who make tips and back-of-the-house workers who don’t. It sparked outrage from worker advocates who said the move would permit management to essentially skim gratuities by participating in the pools themselves.
Senior department political officials—faced with a government analysis showing that workers could lose billions of dollars in tips as a result of the proposal—ordered staff to revise the data methodology to lessen the expected impact, several of the sources said. Although later calculations showed progressively reduced tip losses, Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta and his team are said to have still been uncomfortable with including the data in the proposal. The officials disagreed with assumptions in the analysis that employers would retain their employees’ gratuities, rather than redistribute the money to other hourly workers. They wound up receiving approval from the White House to publish a proposal Dec. 5 that removed the economic transfer data altogether, the sources said.
Trump wants to change that so the tips go to everyone, including the owner's kid who is sleeping in the stockroom. And if the owner happens to dip his or her toe into the business from time to time, maybe acting as the hostess or whatnot, then they get to glom onto a piece of the action. And guess who gets to decide who gets what, boys and girls?
Hint: It's not the person whom you tipped. They're only the person that Trump is allowing to be robbed.
(H/T)
6 comments:
Old news from 2 months ago.
And I too think it is a wrong move.
It was news to me. I can't keep up with the relentless flow of stupidity and rancid ideas from this administration.
Obama issued a rule about tips, Trump goes the other way. If Obama issued a rule about increasing penalties for kiddie porn, Trump would want to protect the rights of child-whores to make a living.
There's just something pathological about Trump.
When I was a line cook, we knew we weren't making as much off payroll as the servers made in tips, but we sort of worked together and the servers would tip us out at the end of their shift, even though they didn't have to.
If you helped your servers give better service, and your food was good, they made more in tips, and were more likely to share some of it at the end of the shift.
Since $9/hr was the most I was ever paid as a cook, (early eighties) that ten bucks or so was often all the money I had after my bills were paid, so I had a strong incentive to get those salads up pronto, be fast and accurate, and make everything look nice.
We made it work, and the restaurant was a better place to eat because of it.
If the owners had tried to impose rules on it, the whole thing would have fallen apart.
-Doug in Oakland
Will it reach the point where no diner will ever leave a tip? No worker will ever take a wait staff job? All restaurants go out of business, except for ones willing to actually pay employees? Or, more likely, President Shithole goes to jail and his first good successor fixes all the Shithole problems?
This is one of the reasons some restaurants/coffee joints around here abolished tips and raised the pay of employees. They tried to make the front and back pay more equitable.
This dude will steal candy from a baby!
Dotard 45 and the GOP/Republican Party just orchestrated the largest transfer of wealth in human history AND still working on stealing more!
OMG!
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