employees

Restaurant Tip Pooling Regulations Audited By The DOL

On February 5th, the Department of Labor (DOL) has proposed a new amendment stating that restaurant employees such as waiters are required to share tip pools with back-of-the-house workers. According to the Fair Labor Standards Act, this audit would allow line cooks and dishwashers to earn tips that were previously denied to them since they were already being paid the full minimum wage. The department officials withheld an economic analysis of this tip expansion rule from public view when they realized that restaurant workers could lose a significant portion of their paychecks.

This rule would only be enforced on employers who don’t accept tip credits and pay a minimum wage, to begin with. In any case, worker advocacy groups are urging the DOL to abolish this rule change because labor officials did not discuss the potential for wage theft by restaurant owners as they could simply avoid dividing tips among the rest of their workers. The DOL was unable to reach a consensus on the costs and benefits of this amendment. Therefore, a public memo by the assistant inspector, Elliot Lewis, asked for an audit initiation. The audit should clarify why a rule change could violate many state wage laws approved under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

On Monday, 17 state attorneys wrote a letter to Secretary Alexander Acosta in opposition to the proposed rule, claiming it would destroy long-held beliefs about “employee and customer expectations” on tipping in exchange for hospitality services. He argued that employers are responsible for paying higher wages to line cooks and dishwashers instead of subsidizing the earnings of servers so all the workers share gratuities. Thus, the DOL was charged with failing to abide by the Administrative Procedures Act by not informing the public of relevant data regarding tip pooling. Christine Owens, the executive director of National Employment Law Project gave her support to the inspector general for conducting this audit as the integrity of the DOL is being jeopardized by failing to consider the welfare of wage earners. The new rule seems to be sparking debate among advocacy groups who refer to it as a form of legal tip theft. Attorneys insisted that the amendment only affects the distribution of tip pools by workers and not by the employer. It calls into question just how much control over tips employers have.

Women in a restaurant

For instance, in California and New York, local laws state that tips are always the property of employees no matter the circumstance. However, other states must decide if management has permission to share a portion of the gratuities among themselves. The DOL spokesman openly dismissed such an idea as absurd because if it were true, then employees will lose the incentive to provide quality service to their customers. The Trump Administration is now being accused of siding with corporations over workers again, by destroying federal protections for restaurant workers’ meager wages.No doubt, the heart of the issue lies in whether employers have the right to distribute tips when they don’t use tip credit. The potential for tip credit lawsuits and costly litigation are still creating conflicting opinions among attorneys in the labor department to this day.

Document Management System, Business Paper Storage Solutions

Document management is a vital component of any successful business. If you run a business you’ll need to know how your storage of physical and paper documents can affect the growth of your company. There are plenty of reasons why you might need to think about taking your physical business documents out of the office, and store them in a secure business document storage facility at a location close to your business, through a company that you can trust.

Searching for a company that provides a secure document storage and business document management service will go some way to providing you with peace of mind that your important business documents are being stored in a safe and secure way, ready to be collected and used as and when you need them next. By doing so you are adhering to data protection legislation, helping to provide your staff with a clearer outlook in the workplace and new smoother processes to work with, and also freeing space in the office that can now be used in ways to make the business money, rather than just space that houses the growing piles of documents that all businesses accumulate as they grow.

By storing your old business documents away in a secure location you can think about digitising those parts of files and folders that are still required by your employees for daily use and processes within the systems you have implemented. A secure long-term storage solution close to your work premises allows you to digitise the important aspects of your old documents and have them ready for your staff to use. Even if this is not the idea at first, by storing elsewhere you are leaving yourself with the chance to maximise efficiency and output in your current business location, utilising previously dead space.

Another aspect that is often overlooked when it comes to business data and documents is that by keeping them on-site, they aren’t just gathering dust, the documents are in fact in danger. There could be vital information, or personal information relating to your employees, suppliers and customers. What happens if these documents are stolen from your premises? Or if there is a fire or flood and documents are damaged or completely destroyed? There is little you can do to protect from these instances, whereas by storing in a secure document storage facility close by you’ll have peace of mind that these things are much less likely to take place there, than at your business premises.

For many businesses there will be a requirement to retrieve documents for future use once they have been stored away. Look to work alongside a document storage facility that has a proper track and trace procedure in place. That way your items will be easily located, retrieved and sent to you as and when you require them. If you have digitised those documents as well, you can also request that the digital copy is sent as well as the authentic original and physical.

All of these things can help a business to run a lot more smoothly and grow efficiently. Document storage solutions are a vital component of any successful business.

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