There’s also the political angle. Is the Senator up for reelection? Would his opposition party love a piece of slime to smear on him? Maybe they would run with the story. They usually have pro bono lawyers at their disposal.
Personally, I would not want to go to a club where I knew they were screwing the employees. The “little guys” can do all kind of things to exact a measure of revenge for a bad situation. Spitting in the food is all too common and the least of the possibilities.
Sounds like an arrogant bunch you are dealing with. Have fun bringing them down.
There’s no evidence here that the employees are being screwed. He’s being paid above minimum wage. If he was never promised tips, why does he deserve tips? If the club had called it an 18% service fee instead of an 18% gratuity, or if it were just added to the cost of each item, would the employee suddenly be unscrewed?
If anybody is being wronged, it’s the membership who is being told they are leaving a tip for the servers, when that is not the case. Legally (and morally) I don’t think the servers have grounds for feeling wronged.
In my humble, non-lawyerly, opinion, there is evidence that the employees are being screwed. The lower minimum wage is a floor, a guarantee, of a minimum (thus the word in the title after all) wage that an employee who derives more than a certain percentage or amount (I forget which it is) of his income in tips. The amount of his base pay is irrelevant to the issue of “Is the employer scarfing the employee’s income?” As a portion of the income for an employee in such a service profession does come from tips, and the employees at the OP’s place of employ are not in a “tip pooling” agreement, the tips are designated by the tipper to go to the employee so tipped. Even if they were in a pool agreement, the management would be required to disperse the tips to the employees. Keeping the tips is wrong.
Have you worked there long enough to generate a W-2 and does it match up with your paycheck?
You can also call the IRS and request a copy of your witholding information/reported earnings to date and see if it matches your check stubs, there will be a small delay from payday to IRS reciept of your witholding but it should be within a week or two.
Yes. If I ask for money, and say it is a donation for my kid’s cancer (say my kid really had cancer) and I then use the money to buy a new computer instead, I have screwed over my kid. If I ask for money from the same person, and he gives me the same amount, but I had said “it’s in order for me to buy a new computer,” and I then proceded to buy that very computer, then my kid has not screwed over.
The only thing that made the difference between my kid being screwed over and not screwed over was the label I attached to the donation.
Similarly, if the money in question is called a “gratuity,” then arguably the server has been screwed, while if it were called a “service fee” then the server would not be thereby screwed.
He’s not a little kid with cancer, he’s an adult who accepted a job for $X/hr with no tips, and is getting $X/hr with no tips. He is getting exactly the amount of money he agreed to, but now he wants to get tips on top of it. AFAIK, people who get tips like waiters usually get paid a nominal hourly wage, he does not get a nominal hourly wage.
I don’t hear him suggesting that he should get paid $2.25/hr plus tips, like every other waiter in the country, he wants his significantly higher hourly wage plus tips.
In my world, if you’re an adult, and enter into an agreement which is clear and easily understood, then you can’t claim you’re being screwed if the other party holds up his end exactly as written and intended. There was no deception on the part of the club with respect to what he would be paid, they offered him $X/hr with no tips and pay him $X/hr with no tips. He is also a “host” not a waiter, so I don’t even know if he would be eligible for tips if the tipping were conducted normally.
Right, and it’s actually easier for the company (and employee) to just pay more and dispense with splitting up collected tips, etc. They can estimate how much gratuity money they expect to pull in and estimate how much extra they can pay over min-wage-with-tips rates.
The amount of the tips you receive probably exceeds the increase in wages that you receive. So, the Country Club is earning a lot of money taking your tips. Go to the authorities on this one.
The OP indicates that the receipts show the service fee and the 18% gratuity, as well as additional tips, are definitely listed as such. This leads me to believe that there is some hanky panky going on w/ the accounting. I think this goes beyond the question of who is legally entitled to the gratuities and into the area of tax fraud.
Perhaps we have someone here who has done bookeeping in the restuarant/service industry and can lend their expertise?
Why not just charge $17 for the meal and dispense with the added 18% gratuity? Because they’re not paying sales tax on the 18% or the $3?
Really, why add $3 service fee and 18% gratuity at all? Why not just charge $21 for your buffet?
And the additional tips that are written in…I don’t know how you could evey say that those don’t go to the server.
Something definitely doesn’t seem right but I’m not entirely convinced that the OP is entitled to part of the 18% or the $3. Tips that are written in are a different story but he said he’s a host, not a server.
Good guess. That’s where I’m from originally (the city), but wrong club.
And I don’t hear you decrying Hamas, so clearly you’re a terrorrist? I would much rather make my $2.13/hour plus tips than this. Which is what I’m headed to do in another job.
In your big, grownup world, would you raise all of your prices 18% and tell your customers “it’s not for me, it’s for these poor, hardworking people you see every day”?
No, that’s called lying to your customers, which is what I said it was from the very start. In my grownup world, I don’t claim to be screwed when a deal I agree to is conducted exactly as I agreed it to be.
If you feel that $2.13 + tips is better, then go for it. That fact, in and of itself, does not make these people crooks. I think the deception of the customer is a bullshit move, and there may be 100 other reasons why they’re sleazy scumbags, but they’re treating you exactly as you agreed to be treated.
When I interviewed, they told me I’d be earning $7.50/hour, and a percentage of the tipshare. They only told me the day I started work that I wouldn’t be getting that.
Well, that sure clears up the crook vs. non-crook aspect of the whole thing.
I’ll happily classify them as crooks to you, their customers, and possibly the state of Alabama as well. When you get a new job lined up, go after them with both barrells.
Your leverage here is with the club members, because they’re the ones being misled. And it’s their club.
If it were my club doing this, I’d be seriously pissed off that the club had been intentionally misleading me into thinking that I was giving a tip to the individual when in fact I was just giving more money to the club. I say “intentionally misleading” because that’s the only reason to split out the line for an additional gratuity. Being a cynic experienced in the world of business, I might assume that the 18% and the $3 charge went to the establishment – and then the wait staff gets a cut, or maybe not. But the additional line for a tip clearly says “here’s where you can make sure Joey gets a little something extra for hustling when you wanted more iced tea.”
Otherwise, why would anyone spontaneously add a few more dollars to their bill and just pad the club’s bottom line for no reason? The club is misleading its own members and I don’t think they’ll take kindly to that.
I’d forget all the lawyers, government agencies and so forth, and instead I’d find a way to let the club members know. They’ll either change the policy, or they’ll just stop adding it to the bill and give you cash instead.
It has to be a legal agreement. The clearest contract language in the world doesn’t permit me to do something illegal to you. At one end of the scale, for example, you cannot sign an agreement that allows me to murder you. At the other end of the scale is something like this. As the cites to federal labor law have made clear, tips and gratuities go to the wait staff, period, end of story.
Clarification: While you can certainly sign the agreement, it doesn’t give me the legal right to take your life. In this case, an agreement that basically states “I will not complain about your unambiguous violation of labor law” is not valid.
Incidentally, I really like the idea of contacting a club-member politician’s election rival.
