The Trump administration, backed by the National Restaurant Association (“the other NRA”), has taken another step toward letting corporations steal $5.8 billion in workers’ tips every year.1
Despite hundreds of thousands of people like you speaking out, Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta officially proposed the new rule that would allow restaurant owners to pocket the tips of millions of restaurant and service workers. Now it is in the hands of Congress.
Will you step up again to help block this outrageous rule? Join us, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, and others and send a message to Congress.
The Department of Labor (DOL) is required to provide an estimate of all proposed rules’ economic impacts. The DOL claimed that such an analysis was impossible for this rule. But critical investigative reporting2 revealed that the DOL did produce an estimate, but then hid its own analysis because it showed that the rule would be terrible for workers.
Here’s what we do know about the rule: Most of the money corporations could steal would come from women’s pockets. Almost 70 percent of tipped workers are women and a majority of them work in the restaurant industry. This rule would also exacerbate sexual harassment — in an industry that already has some of the highest rates of sexual harassment in the entire labor market.3
Workers should make a living wage instead of having to rely on tips. And that’s why it’s so important that we do the long-term work of challenging our broken food system and broken political system that are rigged to benefit huge corporations. But at the same time that we work toward long-term solutions, we absolutely have to stand with workers who, right now, depend on hard-earned tips to make ends meet.
1. http://www.epi.org/publication/employers-would-pocket-workers-tips-under-trump-administrations-proposed-tip-stealing-rule
2. https://bnanews.bna.com/daily-labor-report/labor-dept-ditches-data-on-worker-tips-retained-by-businesses
3. http://rocunited.org/2014/10/new-report-the-glass-floor-sexual-harassment-in-the-restaurant-industry
