Liberals are trying to pressure the Trump administration into walking back a proposal to allow restaurant owners to be able to take tips given to waiters and bartenders.
The restaurant industry argues that such a change would allow the owners to redistribute the money among employees, but Democrats and their allies announced Friday they will hold a forum next week to emphasize the potential negative impact of the rule as well as highlight “the issues with the [Labor Department’s] rulemaking process.”
The Labor Department published a proposal in December to rescind an Obama administration regulation that clarified that tips were the property of the employees who received them. The restaurant industry has been lobbying hard for the change. They argue that increases in the minimum wage in many states have resulted in the restaurant workers who receive tips on top of that doing far better than the ones who don’t interact with customers. The result has been that many owners often can’t find people to do the non-tipped work. Allowing them to spread the tips among everyone would solve the problem, the industry argues.
Liberals counter the change would allow unscrupulous managers to keep the money for themselves — and would remain unfair even if owners do redistribute the money to all workers. “It’s theft … Restaurants just want to be able to subsidize their low salaries for the ‘back of the house’ workers, like cooks and dishwashers, by taking money from waiters and bartenders. It’s a way to get out of paying a decent salary to non-tipped occupations,” D. Taylor, president of the hospitality industry union Unite Here, told the Washington Examiner.
The period to publicly comment on the proposal ended Friday, meaning department officials will begin drafting a new rule. Also on Friday, a group of Democrats led by Reps. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, Mark Takano of California, and Bobby Scott of Virginia announced they would hold a forum Thursday with liberal activists to allow members of Congress to “hear from and question experts and advocates on the potential impact of the rule.”
The liberals are also pushing the department to release internal documents regarding the drafting of the proposal, arguing the administration improperly withheld information regarding the rule’s potential effects.
A Bloomberg report citing anonymous sources that said that senior Labor Department officials ordered staff involved in the proposal to revise reports that assumed a large portion of employers would keep potentially billions of dollars in tips for themselves. The reports were revised but later dropped altogether when the department published its proposal on Dec. 5. The department’s Office of the Inspector General has opened an inquiry into whether the rulemaking process was violated.
