✯✯✯ Do you work for tips? — Read & reblog ASAP. Timing is critical here! ✯✯✯
Reprinted in full from The New York Times, Friday, Feb 2nd
There are some documents that the Trump administration is working very hard to publicize. There are others that it’s working very hard to bury.
If you want some good analysis of the latest twists involving the Nunes memo, you can find it from my colleague Michelle Goldberg. I’m going to focus elsewhere today: on an internal Labor Department report that shows that one of its own proposals — allowing business owners to keep tips for themselves — would cost workers billions of dollars a year. That’s the report the Trump administration is trying to bury.
Ben Penn of Bloomberg Law broke the story yesterday. He reported that Labor Department leaders first ordered a change in the report’s methodology to make it seem as if the proposed rule wouldn’t hurt workers very much. When the new methodology still made the rule look bad for workers — because it is bad for workers — the leaders shelved the report, rather than including it in public documents.
The buried report is especially telling because it undercuts administration officials’ public rationale for the rule change. They say it will free business owners to share tips with back-office workers, like restaurant dishwashers. But the rule doesn’t require them to do so (as, of course, it could), and there is every reason to think owners will keep money for themselves.
The tip proposal — which is likely to go into effect in coming months — is part of the administration’s ongoing campaign to make life easier for corporations and harder for workers and consumers. It’s Trumpian populism, which, like so many other Trumpian things, amounts to the opposite of what the president says it does.
In all, American workers receive about $36 billion a year in tips, the economist Heidi Shierholz, a former Labor Department official, told me yesterday. The typical tipped worker receives about $6,700 a year in tips. The Trump proposal would make about two-thirds of this total vulnerable to seizure by business owners. (Shierholz goes into more detail in this Q&A, and The Times’s editorial board has also explained the issue.)
So what can be done? The public-comment period on the proposed ruleremains open until Monday, and it’s not hard to submit a comment online. Worker advocates may also challenge the rule legally, given the administration’s lack of transparency. Individual states can also pass their own more stringent tip laws, as some already have.
Trump’s (Other) Memo Cover-Up
Published
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