Lazy Manager Thinks She Can Get Away With Illegally Participating In Tip Pool, But One Employee Takes Matters Into Their Own Hands And Goes To HR

The infamous Murphy's law says that, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." Buttered toast falling off a table will almost invariably fall buttered side down. When queuing, the other line will 99% of the time move faster than the one you just gave up on. And if you work in hospitality, your tips may simply be stolen by a careless manager who couldn't give two cents about your feelings or the laws of thermodynamics.

And this is what happened to u/mddnaa, a coffee chain store employee. "Manager makes $1000 a week. But she still illegally participates in the tip pool. What should I do?" he asked the r/antiwork community earlier this week, tired of the injustice that fell upon his crew - some of which are homeless or on Medicaid. He tried turning to higher-ups, but even they were powerless, blaming the confusing laws and not its abuser.

Tipping, a quintessential American custom, is a big part of hospitality work. It always has been. Especially when most minimum wage employees rely on gratuity to meet to make ends meet. According to the latest data, about 85-100% of a waiter's salary is made up of tips, while for baristas this number ranges between 20-40%, making them less reliant on a customer's generosity.

Tipping culture, despite how some people feel about it today, saying that "it got out of control", was put through a test, particularly in the last few years. According to research by One Fair Wage and the Food Labor Research Center, 4 in 5 restaurant workers have reported a decline in their tips during the pandemic. In addition, over 40% of the workers reported experiencing an increase in unwanted sexual comments from customers. On the bright side, most people have felt that a 15% or bigger tip for a takeout meal or grocery delivery was the least they could do to help essential workers who risked their well-being for the sake of others. Not that many of them had a choice.

But every system, no matter how good, has its flaws. While tipping may seem like a good way to support hospitality workers and incentivize good service, it actually only underlines a broken system that allows employers to pay their employees unfair wages. To understand just how bad it is, listen to this: under the Fair Labor Standards Act, tipped employees can be paid as little as $2.13 an hour in direct wages, as long as their tips make up the difference to meet the state's minimum wage. Unsurprisingly, many employees choose to do exactly that.

The only silver lining of this act is that employers, managers, and supervisors are not allowed to take part in the tip pool. Of course, each state and county has different laws. But when the Department of Labor finds out that managers have snuck their greedy hand into the tipping jar, justice strikes like a hammer. Which is what happened to Dallas-area restaurant chain, Hard Eight BBQ, last year, when it was discovered that the restaurant owed about $867,500 in unpaid tips and overtime premiums to its staff. That's a lot of tip jars.

To understand the situation better, Bored Panda reached out to u/mddnaa, the author of the post, who preferred that both his real name and the name of his workplace remain undisclosed. "I've been here for 4 years and we've always had managers taking tips," he explained, adding that all 4 managers he worked with, every single one of them participated in the tip pool. "I didn't know it was illegal in New York State until my coworker showed me the law and reached out to an employment lawyer."

According to u/mddnaa, this was the same colleague who confronted the manager about illegally participating in the tip jar. Before he quit ("he was so sick of the treatment," we are told), the manager "kept telling crew members that she was going to fire him for not splitting her in on tips." Another example of A-class management.

Even after consulting the district manager, u/mddnaa's supervisor wasn't convinced she was doing anything illegal here. "Our manager said that the district manager told her that 'all of the other managers in her district don't take tips. But I think the law says if they hand the tips to you directly, it's okay," he explained. Of course, the manager took it as an excuse to participate in the tip jar, even if she's not on the floor throughout the workday, which is a breach of New York's tipping pool laws.

"I did write a letter to HR a few months ago that had many complaints, including the tip thing. But nothing really came of it," u/mddnaa said, noting that he and his team tried looking into unionization - something that Starbucks employees in New York state successfully achieved in 2021, paving the way for other companies disappointed with unbearable work conditions - but didn't know how, since their company is a franchise, unlike Starbucks. "It keeps getting worse but they only care about protecting the company."