Moye White associate attorney Vikrama S. Chandrashekar spoke to Ed Sealover with the Denver Business Journal about a federal rule takes that bans salaried managers from sharing in tip-pooling with other front- and back-of-the-house staff.
The interview was featured in a Denver Business Journal article, Federal Government Enacting New Tipping Rule for Restaurants, published on November 22. An excerpt from the article is below.
Colorado restaurants already dealing with rising costs and labor shortages will have one more rule to follow beginning tomorrow, although its effects aren’t expected to be as wide-ranging as most of the changes that eateries have faced for the past 20 months.
The rule is not expected to have a major effect on Denver-area restaurants, where it is standard practice that managers don’t participate in tip-pooling arrangements in which servers gather tips together and share them with cooks, dishwashers and other hourly workers. That’s only allowed now if restaurants provide written notice to customers that their managers participate in tip-pooling and if the tips can’t be what is required for those managers to make a minimum wage, said Vika Chandrashekar, an attorney at Moye White LLP.
Thus, restaurants that do have salaried workers as part of their tip-pooling arrangements need simply to remove those managers from the pools and remove their notice to customers, as they should not need to raise pay levels to bring them up to minimum wage, Chandrashekar said. Managers and supervisors can contribute tips into a pool if they receive them, but they cannot keep any of that pooled money, the rule specifies.
“I don’t think this is an earth-changing rule, but I do think it’s certainly something that a subset of employers will need to be aware of,” he said in an interview.
Read the full article in the Denver Business Journal.
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