Tipped restaurant and bar workers in Chicago will make $15.80 per hour through raises over the next few years as subminimum wages are banned.
This is how it always should be. There is no good reason for employers to pay less if someone makes tips. It is stealing…whatever the law says.
Yeah we had this in the UK for a time when minimum wage was introduced. Up until about 2008-2009 when it was finally changed so that employees had to have minimum wage regardless of tips the hospitality industry didn’t collapse despite the noise made in the right wing press.
However we now have issues with employers stealing tips from employees via various dodgy practices. The law is likely to change again here to protect tips too.
Chicago are making a step in the right direction but employees will still lose out of tips aren’t protected too
I (almost) always tip in cash. I hope this lowers the chance that an employer can intercept it.
They should have raised their wages more and done away with tipping though
When I started learning about 7i it blew my mind being from the West Coast. Incredibly horrific piece of law.
It should have been $15/hr 20 years ago.
Will tips still be included though? Or are they eliminating tips?
Washington State changed the minimum wage years ago and mandated it to include tipped workers. It didn’t really change the tipping, but the tips still went to the staff, so at least the workers got a more livable income out of the deal.
I’m just sick of tipping now, I’m done. I won’t go to restaurants anymore because of it
Currently the subminimum wage in Chicago ranges from $9 to $9.48 an hour plus tips.
Restaurant servers and other tipped workers are paid a “subminimum wage” which acts as a base pay and is bolstered by tips.
Chicago does tips on top of the wage. That hasn’t changed. So that might mean eliminating tips to some patrons.
Tips will be mostly irrelevant once patrons are not shamed and manipulated into paying tips. If the salaries are already paid, most people will not tip.
Tips finally got to a breaking point in the US and they’re on the way out for good.
Tips would probably go to the company. They’ll get their’s no matter what.
Pretty sure a tip intended for an employee going to the employer is illegal. Employers cannot keep tips.
This is true, in Illinois. However, restaurants can do whatever they like with “service charges”, though customarily those go to the service staff. Automatic gratuity is already illegal in Illinois, or at least illegal to enforce, so a lot of restaurants already apply a service charge on large parties… easy enough, and perfectly legal, to expand that and claim it as revenue.
And that’s just the legal route. Wage theft is rampant in this industry, at least in Chicago.
Source: Am current server in Chicago for over decade.
You think it’s just in Chicago? Wage theft is the biggest type of theft in the entire nation. Dollar for dollar, it dwarfs the rest put together.
How can they just get away with doing the same thing simply by calling it something else?
Because tips, even automatic ones, go straight to servers and the restaurant isn’t taxed on that money. Service charges are counted as revenue and the restaurant has to pay taxes on it.
So the state has an interest in encouraging the latter, since it gets taxed twice.
Don’t they charge income taxes on tips?
Yes, but with service charges, the restaurant is taxed as revenue AND the sever is taxed as income.
You think the law will stop them?
The NLRB loves cases like this
The NLRB is not a true friend to workers.
That would be illegal.
Nice. always struck me as insane when i heard that waiters in the US were expected to make money from tips and were paid almost nothing
