The following article by Casey Quinlan was posted on the ThinkProgress website February 1, 2018:
Trump’s administration “is giving a windfall to restaurant owners out of the pockets of tipped workers.”
The Department of Labor decided to scrub an analysis from its proposal affecting tipped workers after it found workers would be robbed of billions of dollars,according to former and current department sources who spoke to Bloomberg Law.
In December, the Labor Department proposed a rule that rescinded portions of Obama-administration tip regulations and would allow employers who pay the minimum wage to take workers’ tips. The department said the proposed rule would allow “back of the house” workers, such as dishwashers and cooks, who don’t typically receive tips, to be part of a tip-sharing pool. But the rule also wouldn’t prevent employers from just keeping the tips and not redistributing them.
The department never offered any estimate to the public of the amount of tips that would be shifted from workers to employers. The work of analyzing costs and benefits to proposed rules is legally required for the rulemaking process, Economic Policy Institute noted. EPI did its own analysis and found that tipped workers would lose $5.8 billion a year in tips as a result of this rule. Women in tipped jobs would lose $4.6 billion annually. Continue reading “Labor Department scrubbed analysis that said its proposal would rob billions from workers”