Restaurant workers look set to keep their tips after all

After a battle over whether tip-pooling would become the new norm, servers and other tipped restaurant staffers will be allowed to keep their own money.

Congress is set to vote this week on a budget bill that includes a provision ensuring workers can keep their own tips. The provision, which is likely to pass, comes after the Trump administration had proposed a change in December that would have rolled back Obama administration prohibitions on pooling tips to share them with colleagues in jobs that are not tipped, like those in the kitchen.

Many workers opposed the change, saying business owners had no incentive to redistribute the tips, and could pocket the additional funds instead. “The fact that hundreds of thousands of workers stood up and said no to employers taking their tips, and that Congressional leadership listened and acted, is a testament to the power of workers standing up together,” Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and president of Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United, said.

Some 350,000 restaurant workers and other interested parties submitted public comments opposing the Trump administration proposal and testified on Capitol Hill. They also staged actions in front of the U.S. Labor Department buildings across the U.S., including posting a banner in front of the headquarters in Washington, D.C. that said, “Trump, Don’t Steal Our Tips!”

Had the change passed, restaurant owners could have pocketed between $523 million and $14.2 billion in additional tips, a study from the progressive Economic Policy Institute think tank found. Nearly 80% of the tips that would be taken from employees would come out of the pockets of female tipped workers, according to the EPI.

An economic analysis showing these negative implications was allegedly scrubbed by the Department of Labor, a report from the Economic Policy Institute found. (The Department of Labor did not respond to request for comment.) Now that this change has been stopped, the next fight for these organizations is raising wages for tipped workers, said Jayaraman.

“The next step is that we need one fair wage—the elimination of the lower wage for tipped workers so that this incredibly large workforce, the majority of whom are women, is not entirely dependent on customer tips to feed their families,” she said. “When this omnibus bill passes, it will represent an enormous step toward that final victory.”