Hands off waiters’ tips, province tells restaurant owners

Employers can’t skim servers’ gratuities as new bill passes

Employers: keep your hands off the tips for the staff.

After four years of delays, legislation passed Monday by Ontario MPPs bars owners of restaurants, spas and other businesses from taking a cut of tips left by customers for the staff.

“I’ve heard many stories from employees where the employer typically will take 25 or 50 per cent right off the top of the tip pooling,” said Liberal MPP Arthur Potts, who pushed the change in a private members’ bill.

“An employer should not be able to share in the tips.”

The bill will take effect six months after it receives royal assent.

If employees suspect tip fraud, they can complain to the Ministry of Labour’s employment standards branch, which will investigate and has the power to order the money be repaid. Some restaurant owners “use a part of the tips to pay the staff,” said Lis Pimental, president of Unite Here Local 75, a union representing about 8,000 hospitality workers in the GTA.

The bill — which originated with New Democrat MPP Michael Prue, who subsequently lost the riding of Beaches-East York to Potts — was passed with support from all parties.

The NDP voted in favour despite concerns business owners will be al- lowed to recoup processing fees charged by credit card companies when tips are not left in cash.

Those fees are often in the 2-percent to 3-per-cent range.

“The cost of having a credit card service in your establishment is a cost that should be borne by a business. You shouldn’t be nickel-and-diming the servers in terms of the amount of tip that is credited to that credit card,” said NDP Leader Andrea Horwath.

“It’s really splitting hairs and it’s the people who are serving the customers that should be getting the complete value of the tip they are left.”

Potts defended that plan, saying employers should not be “subsidizing” tips by absorbing the portion of credit card processing fees on tips.

“It’s an insignificant amount from an employees’ perspective, but in a large establishment it’s a significant amount.”

Since it was first introduced by Prue, the bill has been amended to allow managers to temporarily withhold tips and pool them for redistribution to other workers who do not work on the front lines of customer service, such as back-of-house staff in restaurants.

Bosses won’t be able to share in the tips unless they are the sole owner or double as servers and the law phases out provisions in collective agreements that allowed managers to take up to 50 per cent of tip pools.

Other provinces have similar legislation, including Quebec, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Newfoundland.

MPPs also passed a bill requiring pharmacists to only dispense the painkiller Fentanyl, a powerful opiate coveted by illicit drug users, after a doctor calls or faxes a prescription and only when patients turn in their used Fentanyl skin patches.

“It will save lives,” said Progressive Conservative MPP Vic Fedeli, who proposed the law after a rising number of deaths from Fentanyl abuse, in which non-medical users will seek out used patches to scrap or suck off the drug.

Toronto police have warned about the dangers of Fentanyl and possible overdoses — at least 655 people died from the drug between 2009 and 2014, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse.