Deceit. Hypocrisy. Fat-cat club management ripping off working stiffs. Hell, the thing practically writes itself! Seriously, I hope and expect he’ll find it a pretty juicy story.
You will have to start referring to management now as The Man. The Man is never on your side. Beware The Man.
I’m not especially convinced that the members of the Club will be very sympathetic to the OP’s cause. In cases like this, the upper-class members generally feel that they have much more in common with the Board and the Management of the Club than with the working stiffs who serve their dinner. I think that many of them probably won’t give a shit where their 18% gratuity goes, and will be happy to live with the current situation rather than cause disruption in the running of the Club.
Here’s an article about a restaurant in MA (the famous Hilltop Steakhouse in Saugus) that was pulling a similar, but less blatant trick. On large parties, they were charging an 18% service fee, but only giving 14-15% to the waitstaff with the managers keeping the rest. Four waitresses who complained were fired as well. They lost the lawsuit, and now have to pay 2.5 mil back to the servers.
Naw.
A good % of the high middle upper class are control freaks; if they tell you do something just so, they’ll FREAK if you do something just like so.
The moment one of the club members with this personality type tips $2 over the minimum expecting it to go to the server and it goes to the club instead, he’ll acquire an intense desire to extinguish $400 cigars on the club manager or whoever thwarted his desires.
Granted, some of the members will be ambivalent, but they won’t all.
The restaurant has posted a [del]bullshit excuse[/del] rebuttal on its website.