In the U.K., if the person is a contract employee, then it’s absolutely legal. Contractors typically have Professional Indemnity Insurance to cover any errors.
I admit I do not know the law in this case.
However, it seems to me that in a world where the fiction of “corporation” exists, in part, to shield specific owners/managers/decision-makers from direct personal responsibility for mistakes management makes or debts the corporation incurs, it’s clearly unfair to impose a different standard on employees.
Yeah, I’ve never understood the concept of a lower minimum wage for jobs that allow for tips; the extra money is the whole point of why they are good jobs and the employer should have their pick of capabale people. OTOH, I don’t understand why any waiter in NYC suddenly thinks they are entitled to 20%. Bad enough it’s jumped from 10% to 15% over the last few decades.
The area of tips is up in the air in most of Canada. I know of one place in British COlumbia (Kelowna waterfront, IIRC) where the boss took most of the tips because “it cost a lot of money to get this place established, and we just opened”. Some take it and pool it all, some leave it for the worker. Some bosses are @$$holes, some are not.
My wife complained once that the waitresses made more than her as manager. the bar girls in tight T-shirts sometimes would take home over $200 extra a night. Technically they were supposed to add that to their income tax reported, but yeah, right…
The tip sharing counting and allocation back then (2% of total bill, not percent of tip) was done by a volunteer from the kitchen staff, not the management - hence did not qualify as management taking some employees’ money. Technically it was voluntary; but those guys making your orders knew whether you participated or not. The kitchen staff ended up with about an extra $2/hour or so. When a particularly large group left without tipping, as certain ethnics were wont to do, sometimes the manager would adjust the bill to produce enough for the tip pool.
This is a bit of a hijack, but…
One extreme of how much an employee can cost an employer with an innocent mistake is at my sister’s job. She works in biotech for Big Pharma. Once they’ve had the cells in the vats make a batch of protein, it eventually ends up as a little glass jar of powder that might be worth a million dollars or more. The techs are occasionally in situations where they could drop the bottle! I don’t think that has happened yet, but every so often they find out at the end of a long run that, for instance, the pH of a cleaning solution was off enough, or even just not documented properly, and they HAVE had to throw out a batch of drug worth a quarter-million dollars or more. So of course the corporate power structure’s response is to pressure the techs to go faster to do these procedures and to skimp on training.
I worked in a lab where we used some things for genetic sequencing that were hundreds of dollars for a tiny little tube. I used to have nightmares about accidentally tipping the tube over and spilling it’s contents lol. Not because I’d get in trouble but because I was also in charge of purchasing and knew how much everything cost.
I did however damage the company van…
OTOH it seems every movie or tv show in which one of the characters works at a bank, they are depicted as having to personally make up for any balance problems at the end of the day…
What is the current rate of unemployment? If one of my employees f’s up, it is (currently) not too difficult to replace them.
If a very good employee makes an honest error, I consider it part of doing business, and they see me as a good guy for not making a big deal over it. If a marginal employee screws up, I see it as an opportunity to replace them with someone better.
But those were pursuant to court orders and were either garnishments or attachments.
I bet there is someone at Toyota right now hoping he won’t get the bill for the little snafu he caused.
If they’re hourly, wouldn’t it be easier just to cut their hours?
In the grand scheme of the universe and employee (usually) brings in more money than they cost. Cutting hours, especially if a business is running at or near capacity would be shooting yourself in the foot to punish the employee.
Moses definitely held his staff personally accountable when it turned into a snake.
I remember my stint as a Gas Station Manager in New Zealand - we could also be personally fined (up to $50k maybe) if our staff failed to follow safety procedures for Environmental stuff.
There was one case at “my” station that was a bit legendary - one staff member tipped 30 litres of petrol / diesel mix down a stormwater drain - the whole neighbourhood had to be evacuated.
And if that wasn’t scary enough, when fuel is delivered the flow rate is something like 500 or 1,000 litres a minute…
I’ve seen employers do it, though – work with as little staff as they can get away with, just to save money. (You’ve never heard of “short-staffing?”)
And in this case, they’d simply be cutting the hours of one particular person. They’d probably end up increasing the others.
As a quick aside on this, its particularly assholeish of a business to stiff the waitstaff with the BILL – considering that the business is out the labor and food costs.
I recall reading of a case in western Canada where a sequence of manhole covers went zooming into the sky as the gasoline or whatever made it’s way down the sewer then exploded. As near as theycould tell, someone at one end of town poured a large quantity of flamable liquid into the storm sewer.
Or the guy who was delivering heating oil to a house… WHhen he had pumped more than a tank holds into the filler pipe, he stopped and checked and realized he had the wrong address. The homeowner had removed the oil tank years ago but never removed the filler pipe or plugged it up. 200 gallons of diesel (heating oil) in a nice finished basement. Call your insurance company!
If the employer hasn’t considered the obvious accidents that can happen (and what they can cost) then they deserve to eat the cost of accidents. If you can drop a vial and do $100,000 damage, then you make sure EVERY vial in inserted in a wide-based stand, and transported on a tip-proof cart even if it’s only a few ounces. If you’re working with fragile treat it as fragile. If you catch people not following procedure and don’t fire them, don’t be surprised when one doesn’t follow procedure to the tune of a million dollars.