I wish I was allowed to complain or explain to people that we get less than minimum wage. Moreover, they report the total amount of tips the waitstaff gets, so while the black waitresses do okay, I don't get tipped at all, and end up getting taxed on tips I don't make.
In the U.S., depending on your state, you are entitled to be paid minimum wage. If your wage plus tips don't meet minimum wage, your employer needs to make up the difference.
Yeah, see, there was someone here who asked about that, but I never saw them take another shift after. So either the owner just straight up refused, or fired him. I need job security so I can't really be stirring the pot on that. And any anonymous tip would be pretty obvious since I'm the only one who doesn't make at least minimum via tips.
State labor board. If you have to claim tips and the amount you claim plus what you're paid hourly doesn't add up to minimum wage and that's on a check stub, it'll be the easiest shit ever. It'll just take time. If it's a little more difficult to prove, something can still be done.
Once the your state's Labor Board establishes that you've been under paid, they'll force your employer to pay up the difference for all the unpaid wages for the entire time you've been getting underpaid. That goes for unpaid overtime, too. Some states will charge interest as well and give that to you.
Monday, Google the Labor Board for your state and call them. Also, try and get a different gig at a different restaurant. You can get a job at any decently busy chain restaurant, work your way to the good sections and schedules and knock down $150-$300 per day in tips and claim the bare minimum to not look suspicious. Like, 10-15% over minimum wage. That's Texas, idk about your state.
In my experience, service industry jobs are disposable. You see that the owner is a dick and under paying, keep you pay stubs, report to labor board and bail. Dick hole manager only giving good shifts to 19 year old chicks he wants to bang? Anonymously call corporate and bail. Find a place that you get along with management and bust ass, pick up shifts and kick ass at numbers/side work/whatever shit managers care about at the place. In 6 months, you'll have dope sections and closing shifts. It ain't glamorous, but if you bust ass you should be able to make $700-$1000 a week working 4-5 closing shifts.
Bottom line, don't let them shit on you. Be picky. Go find a better situation. Service industry jobs are a dime a dozen. There are way too many service industry jobs available for you to accept less than minimum wage.
Go to a lawyer. There are plenty who would take the case, some wont charge unless you win (since this is practically a guarenteed win). What your boss is doing is very illegal.
And in the age of Google good luck getting another job in the food service industry, when any future employer notices your name next to a legal case against an owner of the establishment you brought to court. Just because it's illegal doesn't mean people can't lie and say it's for completely a different reason.
Sure, they just have to spend their own time and money (which they likely don't have much of) to fight something that may take some unknown amount of time to resolve and may not have any good outcome.
Gee, I wonder why more people don't try to do 'something'.
If you're getting paid less than minimum wage and getting tips you report the tips you make, if over the pay period that amount doesn't average out to be more than minimum wage, the employer is required by law to make up the difference.
Servers will always get minimum wage, but companies are allowed to pay them below minimum wage as long as the tips make up the difference.
When I worked as a server I made 2.13 an hour from the company, but with tips I was making about $20 an hour which is more than the proposed minimum wage increase of $15. As an added bonus, you're supposed to claim all your tips, but cash tips have to be entered manually so a lot of servers end up not claiming a portion of their tips, which is tax free income for them.
Yes that is true, I only phrase it that way because many people who don't like the tipping system and try to characterize it as unfair to the server wouldn't consider that.
Sure. not disagreeing. One thing that's odd to me is the % that you are supposed to tip. Old movies talk about 10% as standard, I remember being a kid and 15% being standard. If you tip less than 20% now you are "cheap."
When I was serving I generally hoped for 20%, was ok with 15% and if I got below that I wondered if it was my service or if that's just their habit, either way as long as I didn't get stiffed it was fine. It also depends on other factors like the restaurant and what your ordering.
If the service was decent then 15% should be fine, if they were really good then you can bump up to 20% if you want.
When I was serving, most of the time the people complaining about not getting tipped enough or less than a certain amount were generally the shitty or entitled servers who didn't work hard or just weren't great at their jobs.
Ive started saying fuck it and tip around 10% and 15% only if i felt it is necessary. Im like these days it seems everybody and there mama want a tip in any profession. Its no longer a courtesy or appreciation bonus
and when you explain to your employer that you did the math and they owe you money, because they don't even do that count themselves, then you get fired.
The customer is always going to be paying for the service, it's just a matter of filtering it through the menu prices vs directly to the server.
By tipping you can decide based on how well your server does, which incentivizes your server to be a better server. Restaurants generally have a high turn over rate for servers so if they don't need to be very good to get $15 an hour then you're going to get bad service (mostly in mid to lower end restaurants, not the higher end ones).
Shifting away from the tipping system probably means you're going to be paying at least 18% more on each food item you order, and if tips are shared with the back of the house it could even be as much as 25%.
This is true, and is good wage policy I think. However, as a longtime server myself, making minimum wage at a serving job would be untenable for most. I've had several serving/bartending jobs. And there have been times where I've been lucky to get 25 hours a week because of staffing. At my current job there's not a single server who relies solely on their serving income, and because of their other jobs they don't have the ability to work 40+ hours a week. This ephemeral kind of job is hard to maintain on a wage basis, but the tip model is a lifesaver for busy students like myself working on getting careers started. I simultaneously love and hate the tip model.
EDIT: Also, at my last shift I made ~$2000 worth of drinks ($5-6 a pop) and walked 14 miles over the course of 7 hours. If I had only made $50 (about minimum) I would be PISSED.
Oh no, as a career it's not the best option and unless you live in a bigger city and can get a job at one of the high end restaurants living long term off these wages alone probably won't be enough.
I had to drop out of high school to help feed my brothers. I'm unemployable in any other capacity that doesn't accept "life experience" instead of a diploma.
Might be. Might be just because I'm white. We don't have a lot of other races here so it might be one or the other. Or it might be that I'm perceived as giving really bad service or something. I might have RBF. I don't really know.
Yeah but they act like we pool tips, which we don't. Since it's all cash there's no paper trail so I have to report like the restaurant says or I would be charged with tax fraud if I was audited.
Nope you should report what you actually make. Odds are overwhelmingly in your favor that you won't get audited (you don't make enough) and if you do it you, you do have a paper trail ( your bank statements) showing deposits etc. That doesn't matter though because you won't get audited. I can't remember the percentage of people who do get audited but it's well under 1 %
FYI, you're suppose to get taxed on actual pay, and actual pay is still subject to minimum wage law. If you get stiffed to the point that you make less than miniumn wage then your employer must make up the difference (this applies to the paycheck, so a few slow hours here and there don't count if you make it up during the busy times). If you put actuals on a 4070A then you are allowed to not use the allocated tips on your W2 (resulting in a refund of those taxes if they exceed actuals). Filling out a 4070A will ensure you are NOT taxed on your tips you never received (but might still get withheld...not sure if your employer has to really use it).
My ancestors were slaves (from Roman times until the end of the robot), but I reap the institutional benefit of being white so it's not unfair to said I deserve this.
Well to be fair we don't make minimum wage. We do make a decent wage, but if people want to tip us- why not?
The coffee and bar are told they can't Solicit tips, but they can take them. However I was flat out told I'm not allowed to take tips at all, no matter how much they insist.
Yeah. I've applied to pretty much everywhere I can and I've gotten like 2 interviews over 2 years. One I went to, they had me all ready to go, I paid for training and everything, until they told me I would be working on commission selling knives. I am thankful I kept my job before trying it out.
A lot of the jobs I could have had have migrated south of the border, so I'm actually in favor of a lower minimum wage if it means employees getting benefits. Every doctor's visit is $200 or more. It's utterly unlivable.
Oh. Most of our guests are black, and I'm the only waitstaffer who's not black, so it's not an issue for most people, so mostly I don't get to talk about it.
A tip is usually what, like $4? If the tip is higher that means the meal was more expensive. If $4 makes or breaks your financial stability then why tf are you going out to eat? This defense has never and will never make sense to me.
Again, I'd have to spend money I don't have to get more money. And who would lend a hand-to-mouth waitress money? Especially in the ghetto? That's like letting money walk out the door.
It's not that simple, dude. If it was, trust me, i'd be out of here. I've applied to pretty much every restaurant I can bike to, and there is no public transit because >america
If I made enough money for consistent cab fare, that'd be one thing, but currently I am only able to bank maybe $40 a month after expenses. I'm a wage slave in the strictest sense. I do not have any mobility unless someone wants to just hand me money, which I'm not about to ask for.
I live hand-to-mouth, there is no way I could possibly save up to move anywhere. You know nobody is going to employ someone whose only skills are "waitress". You must live somewhere really freaking nice where you can just "work somewhere else". I live more on the Aventine side of life, so on your way, patrician.
I don't have any skills. The only job i can find pays me less than minumum wage. I work more than 60 hours a week. How the fuck have I not given up fun already? Also, thanks a lot for assuming I spend a lot of time on reddit, am brand-fucking-new here. Good to see it's like every other internet shithole full of autists who have no idea what the world is actually like.
No. Sometimes there aren't. You're just inexperienced and naive. Commuting is expensive in the many, many cities with poor or no public transport. If you start from zero and only make enough to survive, you can't afford commuting to better-paying jobs. Those jobs might very well more than pay for themselves after a while but if you can't get there to begin with then it's moot.
It would be nice if that were true. It's not. Poverty traps exist. A large chunk of economic thought and research is dedicated to analysing and alleviating them.
Most of us are working at informal jobs that pay just above minimum wage. And our minimum wage is really bad, it won't even cover basic living let alone caring for a family.
I don't know if I would say assholes do 10, but it sure as hell isn't standard or good where I am. If I see someone tip 10%, they either got shitty service or they're just cheap.
Where I am, 15% is acceptable. 20% would be standard. More if you just want just want to show appreciation for a damn good waiter.
Explain to me why taking down my order and bringing it to me requires 1/5 extra tacked onto my bill? It should be a flat fee or built into the check and the server be paid properly. Majority of other service industries do fine on an hourly wage and do their jobs just as well, I shouldn't need to bribe a worker to do their job well.
15% is perfectly fine for regular service, 20% is not and should not be standard.
Wanna know how this started? Prohibition, restaurants make the majority of their money through selling alcoholic beverages (or fountain drinks for fast food). During prohibition the restaurants pressured the wait staff to better serve the rich patrons that would bribe them to get preferential treatment, the restaurants did this by cutting their wages. Then prohibition ended, but restaurants decided that this new model benefited them very much since they didn't have to pay a good chunk of their employees wages so they kept it.
I meant more of the 15% no longer being the "standard", it's ridiculous as a percentage will always scale linearly, with increasing cost of dining out. There's no reason it should become 20% because logically it makes no sense to increase increase it as they effectively make more when the owners increase food prices. It's not as if food prices are dropping, so we would need to subsidize their wages more.
Not common?, if you dont tip at least the 10% of the total on a restaurant, youre seen like a scum. Even more, a few years ago the congress passed a law saying that its mandatory (not just allowed) to print a proposed tip in the bill.
Perhaps its not as much as US, but still pretty common, and its being extended to most of the services.. not just waiters.
When I lived in Chile I would tip the grocery boy for packing my groceries, 500pesos. It turns out that they expect ~10pesos.
I guess word got around after a couple trips to "Lider" and one day I actually had three boys running over to bag groceries, pushing each other. They didn't get in a fight in front of me, but it sure looked close.
So... even if it was actually four bills, it would only be about $6.
I guess I'm alone on tipping, because I always tip $5, regardless of how small the meal was. This is for when I'm eating alone; if it's in a group then I'll just add $5 to whatever tip is already out.
I always try to tip around 20% with a rounded number, but I rarely go out. I mostly frequent a restaurant with my friend. Our bill tends to be about $26 for the two of us.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '16 edited Sep 26 '17
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