I’m talking letter of the law.
I wouldn’t know if employers automatically generally fire people for not making enough. But I could imagine if someone isn’t making $5/hr in tips on average it may usually be because they’re a crappy server and they might get fired for being crappy at their job.
I don’t know for sure. Found one site referring to calculating it over an 8 hour shift.
In DC the minimum is near $12. How is the employer supposed to keep track of an employees tips? Expect the waiter to be 100% honest? I suppose if the tip is on a credit card there is a record, but not with cash.
Yes. And if the employer finds out you’re lying you get fired.
our minimum is $11.25 in metro Oregon. Wait staff gets 100% of that plus all tips.
Employees report tips to their employer and the employer then withholds taxes.
Its a widely known fact that 100% of employees honestly report all their tip income all the time. (yes thats sarcasm)
Seems it would be hard to find out seeing the waiter just puts the cash in his pocket after the customer leaves. As long as the waiter reports he got at least the minimum, I doubt the employer cares if he reports anything above that.
Yeah pretty much thats how its worked.
But now more / most transactions are with credit/debit card so theres the electronic record that neither employee or employer can avoid or hide from the IRS.
That would be news to Labor attorneys all over the country.
I don’t know much about this. But there are rules where the employer may have to allocate tips to an employee if the employee doesn’t report enough.
Also, a lot of places will have tip-out rules so other employees will care if you don’t fully report your tips. If the other employees think you’re cheating them, they’ll make sure you don’t get enough tips to the point where you’ll be below the threshold.
You should spend your time educating them. Start with this one:
“Do these laws apply to illegal immigrants? Yes.”
Yeah, because of the wide spread cheating on tip income the government started making employers report the dollar value of the food served and a minimum assumed tip rate.
“As an employer, you must ensure that the total tip income reported to you during any pay period is, at a minimum, equal to 8% of your total receipts for that period.”
Fascinating that this 8% of total recipts is being reported.
The people I personally know who have serving jobs and make less than min. wage do so at businesses that are very slow on some days. The 8% of receipts averages out to (I’m sure) cover the owner’s butts vs. the labor hours paid, but these employees do make less than the Federal Min wage some pay periods. They don’t care to bring it up because they don’t want to be fired.
I’m not sure I follow, but this is a tax rule, not a labor rule. In other words, the allocated tips don’t mean that the employer doesn’t have to pay minimum wage. If the employee falls short of minimum wage by $10 in a pay period (just an example, I don’t know how the timing with minimum wage laws work), but on top of the reported tips is allocated $15 by the employer, the employer would still have to make up the $10 differential in cash to the employee.
Bummer about it not being a labor rule. Thanks for clarifying.
My examples are real times when employers are not paying minimum wage. (Example, 1 week check is ~$45 for 25 hours, with $100 in [cash] tips. It seems there’s nothing in place then to help fix that? Short of just mandating the regular minimum wage to tipped and non tipped employees? (full disclosure, I’m in CA, we have one min wage for all)
Better read the post I quoted and the conversation. It was about whether waiters generally steal from their employers. So yes, I am serious that if an owner finds out you’re pocketing tips to require them to lose the tip credit and be forced to pay you out more you’ll get fired.
You cleverly added this condition which obviously changes the scenario entirely, and was the opposite of what the conversation was about.
I don’t think anyone here is under the delusion that people all follow he letter of the law.
We’ve been discussing how the law works, not whether everyone follows it faithfully. I figured it was common knowledge that people often cheat on taxes and that employers sometimes screw their employees so pointing that out seemed unnecessary.
Except I wasn’t referencing illegal immigrants, but legal temporary agricultural workers. The key line from your own cite is:
“Currently the federal minimum wage for covered nonexempt employees is $7.25 per hour.”
The H-2B employer must pay its H-2B workers and workers in corresponding employment at least the wage rate specified in the job order. That wage rate must be at least the highest of the prevailing wage rate obtained from the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) or the applicable Federal, State, or local minimum wage.
I think you’re actually looking for H-2A, but minimum wage still applies:
Rates of Pay: The employer must pay all covered workers at least the highest of the following applicable wage rates in effect at the time work is performed: the adverse effect wage rate (AEWR), the applicable prevailing wage, the agreed-upon collective bargaining rate, or the Federal or State statutory minimum wage.
Granted, this is from 2010, but would be surprised if they changed it.
yeah thanks for the correction, I was thinking of H-2A
Nah, it’s neither of those. It’s some kind of agricultural exemption. I’ll have to ask the next time I’m in Cali.