White House Learns Its Tip-Robbing Plan Will Rob Waiters. Guess What Happened Next.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/white-house-learns-its-tip-robbing-plan-will-rob-waiters.html?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-bWhite House Learns Its Tip-Robbing Plan Will Rob Waiters. Guess What Happened Next.
By Jonathan Chait
The Trump administration is changing labor law so as to allow restaurants to control their employee tip pool. When you’re enacting a regulatory change like this, you have to follow procedures, which include an analysis of its effects. The analysis showed that the thing anybody could guess would happen when you let the boss control the tip pool would happen: The employees would get a lot less of it. In this case, waiters, waitresses, and dishwashers would lose out on hundreds of millions of dollars.
What happened next? If your guess is, the Trump administration decided not to implement this change because it doesn’t want to steal from working-class people, you probably haven’t been following the Republican Party very closely for the last few decades. No, the real response was to omit the analysis.
Budget Director Mick Mulvaney sided with Labor Secretary Alex Acosta to keep the study of the effects of this change on workers out of the rulemaking process. This, reports Bloomberg Law, “allowed the department to delete from the proposal internal estimates showing businesses could take hundreds of millions in gratuities from their workers.”
If you coastal elites don’t like it, sorry — the white working class in the Midwest wanted restaurant owners to be able to steal their workers’ tips, and that’s why the voted for Trump.
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although they may be distributed in a "valid tip pool" shared among TIPPED employees only.
Distributing them among all employees would drop incomes for tipped workers enormously.
Even if that amendment stayed and owners couldn't legally pocket any of the tips directly (note, massive theft would be inevitable), it would nevertheless mean a transfer of tip income to restaurant owners since, of course, many owners would drop pay rates for nontipped workers to offset the new income, including hiring at lower rates.
This isn't just not huge, it's a continuation of the usual scheme to transfer workers' wealth and power upward. Let them eat food stamps.
Plus, I'm not as comfortable as you that that Democratic rep's amendment would be in any bill passed. If it was removed, if employers paid tipped workers minimum wage, all tips would become the property of the employer. Again, although employees would insist on seeing some agreed amount returned to them, massive theft would be inevitable.
I didn't know that some conservative wingnuts consider tip pooling socialistic. That's funny considering the completely opposite purpose behind this. Some people are born fools.
The requirement that an employee must retain all tips does not preclude a valid tip pooling or
sharing arrangement among employees who customarily and regularly receive tips, such as waiters, waitresses, bellhops, counter personnel (who serve customers), bussers, and service bartenders. A valid tip pool may not include employees who do not customarily and regularly received tips, such as dishwashers, cooks, chefs, and janitors.
But if they decide to follow the DOL’s new rule, and they don’t take the tip credit, and instead pay minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to all their employees, then tips are no longer considered the property of the employee; they become property of the employer. That employer could split those tips between back and front of the house. Then again, the employer could also keep them all.
those wages from the owner to the customer. And in many restaurants cooks who don't want to be looking for other jobs will find themselves accepting lowering of wages to offset additional income from tips. Some won't be offered the choice, just let go.
I was a waitress long ago and understand all the arguments for tip pooling, Honeycombe8. With a good station at a casino restaurant in Nevada, my income at 17 years old was a marvel, the bus boys' poverty level, depending on the individual generosity of the waiters to bring it up a bit.
But it's past time to just say no to tipping altogether. It's no more acceptable for me for owners to increase their profits by shifting more of their labor costs to customers than it is to enable employers to drop pay below subsistence level by expecting full-time workers to go on government food stamps to make it possible.
he could steal from the waitstaff at all his properties.
YOU WIN!!!!!!!
That is the POSTER OF THE YEAR!!!!!!!!!!!
Lumping every white working class voter together will definitely help win Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin!
Thanks for explaining all of this to us dummies in flyover land.
It was the hardest job I've ever had, both physically and mentally.
Servers deserve every dime they make 
Most waitstaff here in Fairbanks are college kids; they shouldn't HAVE to pay taxes while earning less than minimum wage. We do cash, directly into the waiters/waitresses/bartenders hands. You'd be amazed how great a service we get in many of the nicer places in town. We never stick to the 15% rule unless the service was truly awful; then, consider why it was (chef too slow, accident in kitchen). If it truly appears to be the waitstaff's fault, they still get 15%.
Not only do the republicans want more for themselves, but they seem absolutely determined to make the lives of working people as unfair and miserable as possible. I really hope there is a hell and that these bastards burn there for an eternity. 
From https://www.vox.com/explainers/2018/3/21/17101260/trump-labor-department-tip-rule
Helen Richardson/The Denver Post via Getty Images
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.)
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More at link.
