The progressive case for Trump's tip-pooling rule

This month, President Trump's Labor Department proposed a new rule that would permit some restaurants to share (or "pool") tips between servers like myself and "heart of the house" employees, such as cooks and dishwashers. It would rescind a 2011 rule that prohibited restaurants from including these latter employees in a tip pool.

Some labor advocacy groups were quick to suggest the new rule would allow employers to "steal" tips; a related Facebook video on the topic featuring actress Jane Fonda went viral. This knee-jerk reaction angered me: As a career restaurant server, I'm strongly supportive of the rule — and my fellow servers should be as well. The argument that the rule will permit employers to "steal" employees' tips is way off base: No tipped employee in his or her right mind would sign up to work in a restaurant where the agreement between staff and management says that all tips are kept by the owner.

Let's start with this: I'm a staunch Democrat, and a proud member of the "resistance" against President Trump. There's very little on which I agree with the President. But in this instance, the proposed rule from the President's Labor Department has been the victim of "fake news."

There are some important facts that servers should know about the proposed rule. First, it only applies in instances where the employer doesn't take a credit for servers' tip income, and where the server is paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25. For the vast majority of servers outside the seven states that don't permit a partial wage credit against tip income (more on that in a minute), or states like New York where the tipped wage is higher than the federal minimum wage, this rule won't change a thing. If you do live in one of the affected states, the rule only affects you if you've voluntarily decided to work at a restaurant that uses a tip pool, and if state law permits it.

This new rule is necessary to allow the sharing of tips with cooks and other heart-of-the-house employees in states that don't count tips toward a server's income. Consider the story of Aunt Mary's Cafe in Oakland, Calif. After the hourly minimum wage in the city rose by three dollars in 2015, a quirk in the state's labor law forced the owner to give his tipped servers a 36 percent increase in their base pay, without acknowledging that, with tips added in, they were earning $30 an hour. This unnecessary raise for his best-paid employees left him with no money to give corresponding raises to his cooks, who had already been just slightly above the new minimum before the minimum wage increase, and thus got nothing at all.