There are an estimated 2.6 million waiters and waitresses in the United States, most of whom are reliant on shamefully low minimum wages of less than $2.13 per hour plus tips. Unfortunately, these restaurant workers could be in for big time changes because of Trump and his obsession with rolling back every single decision of the Obama administration. In this case, they want to revise the Fair Labor Standards Act, which said tips are the property of the servers who earned them, to allow employers to withhold tips. Worse yet, they hid the data showing this could be an estimated $5.8 billion transfer of wealth for servers to restaurant owners. From Bloomberg Law:
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.
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.
The move to drop the analysis means workers, businesses, advocacy groups, and others who want to weigh in on the tip pool proposal will have to do so without seeing the government’s estimate first. The public notice-and-comment period for the proposal is set to end Feb. 5.
If you’d like to weigh in and demand the Trump administration stop this revision to the Fair Labor Standards Act, CLICK HERE AND THEN LOOK FOR THE "COMMENT NOW" BUTTON ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE PAGE. You can only comment once and you must include the following information to be counted:
All comment submissions must include the agency name [Dept. of Labor] and Regulatory Information Number (RIN 1235-AA21) for this NPRM