True. The wages laws that govern service staff is generally written as a conditional, where the employee earns the greater of:
1. Standard minimum wage
2. Some value less than minimum wage + tips
If the employee doesn't break minimum wage by adding their wage+tips, the employer has to make them whole. And then likely cut their hours and force them to look for other work.
Because people who are in a position to be earning those kinds of wages heavily correlate with other situational factors (social, educational, legal, etc.) which may prevent them from reporting the violations. And, the employers who tend to engage in wage theft are generally small businesses, which there are a ton of.
To everyone: please tip. It is in fact very likely that any given restaurant is not and would not make up the difference in pay for an under-tipped employee.
I followed some of the links and could not find a primary source for the data. (Links were either broken, redirected to the same page, or lead to other secondary sources.) So please link that if you've got it.
> "Over two-thirds" means you are more likely than not to eat at a restaurant that has cheated its employees.
No. It doesn't. It means that, in their entire lifetime as employees of any number of employers, two-thirds of employees, at least once, experienced wage theft in some form.
That's a much different statement and says nothing at all about whether those employees were robbed of overtime, asked to work for free, or their employers claimed tip credits for tips the employees didn't receive.
>That's a much different statement and says nothing at all about whether those employees were robbed of overtime, asked to work for free, or their employers claimed tip credits for tips the employees didn't receive.
These are all examples of "cheating employees", I'm glad we agree.
The only thing we agree on is that the items in the previous post are examples of wage theft.
You've convinced me that you are trolling. You haven't addressed any arguments or provided any meaningful support to your pretty extreme claims. Your proposed solution, even if it were effective, would exclude large numbers of non-tipped employees.
Even if, as you assert without evidence, the various labor boards around the country are ineffective, providing them with the funding that would otherwise go to tipped employees would be a much better solution than tipping. It would simultaneously remove resources from thieving employers, make them easier to identify, make it harder for them to find labor, and provide greater resources for those trying to stop them.
1. Standard minimum wage 2. Some value less than minimum wage + tips
If the employee doesn't break minimum wage by adding their wage+tips, the employer has to make them whole. And then likely cut their hours and force them to look for other work.