Kitchen staff can share tips under new law

Change can mean an increase of a few dollars per hour

Kitchen workers in California could get a raise thanks to changes made in the 2018 federal budget to a controversial rule over restaurant tipping.

The new law rescinds a 2011 rule that prevented restaurant owners from sharing servers’ tips with kitchen staff. Under those rules, designed to keep tips in the hands of those involved in the “chain of service,” restaurants could pool tips and redistribute them among customer-facing staff (think servers and bartenders) or require servers to share portions of their tips with front-of-the-house employees — but not cooks or dishwashers in the kitchen.

Now, in states like California that pay full minimum wages to tipped workers — as opposed to the many states that classify tips as a portion of a workers minimum wage — kitchen staff can share in the tips diners leave at the end of their meals.

That could mean an increase of a few dollars per hour for Bay Area kitchen staff, depending on the restaurant, said Rocco Biale, who owns Rocco’s Ristorante Pizzeria in Walnut Creek.

Proponents say the change could help close what has become a big pay disparity between servers and kitchen staff. Local cooks usually make just a few dollars above minimum wage. And though servers typically make just minimum wage, their pay is boosted by tips, which can yield a few hundred dollars during a dinner shift at a fullservice restaurant in the Bay Area.

Bay Area restaurateurs have grappled with how to close the pay gap, particularly as wages overall have been pushed up through both minimum wage legislation and a tight labor market. Before the new law took effect, some Bay Area restaurants had found various ways to compensate employ-

ees in the back of the house. Oakland’s Homeroom, for example, adds a 10 percent service charge to bills that it then splits evenly among staff. Another Oakland restaurant, Homestead, owner Fred Sassen in 2015 eliminated the option for tipping and instead raised menu prices by about 20 percent to increase wages across the restaurant well above the minimum required by law.

But not all restaurants want to take away the tipping model, and for a restaurant that still has traditional tipping, raising menu prices to cover rising labor costs only makes the disparity worse, Biale pointed out — bigger dining tabs yield bigger tips for servers. Opening up the tip pool to kitchen staff helps close the gap, Biale said. “The new ruling just allows kitchen staff to share in it.”

The new federal law was met with opposition when the Department of Labor first introduced it in December. People feared it would leave workers unprotected against bad employers who could pocket the tips. Even in California, where state law prevents employers or managers from keeping workers’ tips, labor advocates and allies criticized the proposal. Thousands of comments from Californians were submitted to the Department of Labor during public feedback on the law.

Eventually, Democratic lawmakers, led by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), negotiated a fix to exclude supervisors, managers and owners from sharing in the tips. The change was signed into lawat the end of March by President Trump as part of the $1.3 trillion spending deal.

““The law cannot be more clear,” said Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, in a news release issued by nonprofit Restaurant Opportunities Center United. “Tips belong to workers and no one else.”