A TIPPING POINT
Gratuities proposal stirs flap
There’s a battle brewing over the time-honored tradition of tipping.
The growing conflict is a result of a proposed new Department of Labor rule that would give restaurant owners flexibility over gratuities and how tips are distributed among the staff, including traditionally non-tipped workers.
Joshua Chaisson, a veteran server and one of the leaders of the recently formed Restaurant Workers of America, said providing good service is an entrepreneurial activity that leads to generous tips. His group is a professional association with about 1,000 members.
However, critics assert that tips are part of an archaic system that could lead to exploitation and sexual harassment.
Chaisson said tipping should not be changed — but that restaurants that pool tips or want to do so be allowed to give nonwaiters a chance to obtain more income.
“We like the system as it is now. We like the freedom and flexibility of our jobs,” he said.
“We don’t need to be saved by them,” Chaisson says of tipping critics.
The anti-gratuity forces include the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), whose codirector, Saru Jayaraman, argued that “tipping is wrong.” She said tipping should be replaced by “one fair wage.”
ROC, in various publications, has linked tipping to slavery, and noted other societies discourage tipping.
“Only in the United States” do tips provide the bulk of an employee’s income, according to an ROC paper. Tipping causes worker exploitation, it contended.
“Servers, and in particular women, can receive larger tips if they touch their customers, call customers by name, smile, crouch next to the table and engage in other similar behaviors. This puts workers who depend on tips in a difficult position when faced with inappropriate customer behavior,” ROC wrote.
Chaisson called ROC “the Scientology” of the restaurant industry and supports the government proposal.
“It is a pragmatic and sensible plan,” he said.
The Trump administration’s pending policy change would reverse an Obama administration rule, which holds that tips are the exclusive property of waiters.
However, the new proposal “would allow tip-sharing in a manner currently prohibited by the regulation, including sharing tips with employees who are not customarily and regularly tipped through a tip pool,” according to the notice of proposed rulemaking filed in the Federal Register by the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division.
The department said that in states where the minimum wage is $15 an hour but waiters receive all or the bulk of tips, there is a growing wage disparity between those working in the dining room and those in the kitchen. They argue pooling would help minority groups.
“Given the demographics in restaurants,” said Angelo Amador, executive director of the Restaurant Law Center, “where kitchen staff skew minority while dining room staff skew non-minority, it is especially important that federal law not impose barriers to kitchen workers receiving greater earnings.”
Still, critics of the tip-pooling proposal say the new rule would be used as an excuse by employers to keep pay low.
But Chaisson, who identifies himself as a Democrat and a member of “the resistance,” is in accord with President Trump.
“There is very little on which I agree with the president,” he said. “But in this instance, the proposed rule from the Labor Department has been the victim of fake news.”