Let’s End Tip Theft in Rhode Island!

Sign the petition and call your lawmakers!

Our anti-tip theft bill has been submitted in the Rhode Island House (HB5121) by Representative Chris Blazejewski and in the Senate (SB574) by Senator Erin Lynch. The legislation would prohibit owners, managers, and supervisors from keeping any portion of an employee’s tips, whether by directing demanding a cut of the tips or stealing through deceptive service charges, credit card fees, or by including themselves in tip pools.

We’re asking everyone to please SIGN OUR PETITION in support of the bill. Also please CALL YOUR LAWMAKERS and urge them to pass this law. Every signature and every call counts. The industry is lobbying against the bill so we need to make our voices heard.

Here are the facts:

•According to the 2011 Economic Policy Institute report “Waiting for Change,” tipped workers are more than twice as likely to be below the federal poverty line as the rest of the workforce. Waiters in particular are almost three times as likely to be below the poverty line.

•Rhode Island’s tipped workers often make as little as $2.89/hr in wages. The rest is supposed to be made up for with tips, but too often workers aren’t able to pocket all of their hard-earned tip money.

•Tip theft is a rampant problem in hotels, restaurants, banquet halls, casinos, and the rest of the service industry. Recent high profile court cases filed against Mario Batali’s restaurants, Hooters, and Yankee Stadium are not isolated incidents, but rather symptomatic of an injustice happening everyday in countless businesses. 

•There is no federal law against tip theft. In theory the Department of Labor says all tips belong to employees, but in practice they only enforce the law if the tip stealing is putting the worker below minimum wage. So, if your boss let’s you keep enough to make $7.25/hr, there’s nothing you can do about it.

•Because it’s such a widespread problem that lacks federal regulation, many states and cities have stepped up to prohibit tip theft. New York, Massachusetts, California, and Utah are just a few of the states that have stepped up to pass legislation. Cities such as Long Beach and Philadelphia have also passed their own laws. Workers’ rights groups in San Antonio are currently pushing to pass an an act to cover their city. 

•Rhode Island’s proposed legislation, HB5121 and SB574, is being widely supported by the state’s labor and activist community. UNITE HERE 217, RI Jobs with Justice, Ocean State Action, Fuerza Laboral, Olneyville Neighborhood Association, AFSC, Mark Gursky, and many more have signed on in support.

•Rhode Island’s law would target the four main types of tip theft:

1. It bans managers, owners, or supervisors from simply demanding a cut of workers’ tips, whether it be a percentage, a flat rate, or for an invented “fee” for “insurance costs” or other imaginary charges

2. It stops businesses from charging customers deceptive “service charges” or “administrative fees” that are partially or wholly absorbed by the business or by managerial employees. Customers believe such fees to be gratuities going to employees, and so don’t tip workers on top of them. Businesses would still be allowed to charge customers these fees but they would need to clearly label the charges as not being a tip.

3. It prohibits employers from charging workers fees when customers tip on credit cards. Credit card companies charge businesses a card processing fee, and businesses often pass that fee onto workers when the customer tips on a credit card. The bill would require that workers receive the full tip that customers write on the credit card tip line.

4. It ban managers, owners, and supervisors from including themselves in tip pools. It prohibits back-of-the-house workers—such as dishwashers and cooks—from being included in tip pools. This is to prevent managers from paying non-tipped workers lower wages then using servers’ tip money to compensate. Tip pooling would still be allowed, whether imposed by managers or created voluntarily by workers, so long as only customarily tipped employees are included in the pool.

•Some industry lobbyists want to water down the bill or create loopholes for certain kinds of businesses. We believe stealing workers tips is wrong no matter how or where it happens. We want the bill passed as it’s written. 

•Please call your lawmakers and sign our petition to help us end tip theft in Rhode Island. 

Email joeyquits@gmail.com for questions or press inquiries. 

Call Your Lawmakers to End Tip Theft in Rhode Island!

Please call your State Representative and Senator and urge them to pass our anti-tip theft bill.

(Learn more about the bill and sign our petition)

Find your lawmakers and their contact information here (Or if you already know your lawmakers see a list of Representatives’ contact info and Senators’ contact info).

When you call you’ll likely get an answering machine or a secretary, but please still leave a message. You can say this or add your own thoughts:

“Hello my name is ____. I live in your district on ____ street. I’m calling to urge you to support Senate Bill 574 [or House Bill 5121 if calling a Representative], the bill to end tip theft in Rhode Island. The bill is currently in the labor committee. It’s common sense that low-wage working Rhode Islanders should keep their hard-earned gratuities and that customers shouldn’t be tricked into giving tip money to managers. Thank you”

If you have another moment, please also call Senate Labor Committee Chairperson Paul W. Fogarty at (401) 949-0895 and House Labor Committee Chairperson Anastasia Williams at (401) 272-8135 and give them the same message. The bill is currently in both labor committees and we need their approval before it can come to a vote. 

NYC Restaurant Workers Sing + Dance to Raise the Minimum Wage

I’ll be back in the next couple weeks with some big updates on our tip theft campaign and some new workers’ stories, but for now check out this beautifully produced video of NYC restaurant workers just slaying a version of “Money” to press the New York legislature to raise the minimum wage. 

Dear Applebee’s: Here’s the Real Reason I’m Mad at You

Update 2/4: My interaction was just one small part of Applebee’s massive social media meltdown over the past few days. Check out this awesome photo essay recapping all the insanity. 

I tweeted at Applebee’s yesterday regarding their firing of a waitress named Chelsea. If you haven’t heard, Chelsea was dismissed after publicly outing a Pastor who, instead of tipping, had left a snotty, insulting note on the receipt. And look Applebee’s responded to me with a link to a defense of the firing!  

Since they took the time to reply, I wanted to write a fuller explanation of what’s wrong with the company, and it runs much deeper than a single waitress being fired. 

Don’t get me wrong, I am angry about Chelsea. It doesn’t seem that she actually broke any rules. She explains it well in an interview with Consumerist: “When I posted this, I didn’t represent Applebee’s in a bad light… In fact, I didn’t represent them at all. I did my best to protect the identity of all parties involved. I didn’t break any specific guidelines in the company handbook — I checked.”

But it’s best not to get caught up on technicalities. Even if she violated a policy, Chelsea outing the Pastor should be applauded, not punished. Customers leave these little notes and treat servers in terrible, degrading ways everyday all over the country. Usually no one says anything, but this time Chelsea stood up. 

By firing her, Applebee’s showed their true attitude toward their employees. As Chelsea says, “…[the Pastor] got embarrassed that their selfishness was made public, [and] Applebee’s has made it clear that they would rather lose a dedicated employee than lose an angry customer. That’s a policy I can’t understand.”

We should expect this kind of behavior from Applebee’s, though. 

According to Restaurant Opportunities Center’s Diners’ Guide—an annual survey on working conditions in the restaurant industry—Applebee’s is among the worst employers in the industry. They received zeros in every category the guide measures, including “Advancement,” “Tipped Wages,” “Non-Tipped Wages,” and offering “Paid Sick Days.” 

Applebee’s has faced multiple sexual harassment suits in the last few years alone (just to name a few: Bismarck, ND; Dundee, MI; and as described in Tracie McMillan’s book). In a class action lawsuit last September, a court ruled that an Illinois Applebee’s had violated various wage and tipping laws. And the chain was one of the loudest voices in the chorus of companies complaining about having to provide their employees health care under the ACA. 

Chelsea backed up all this in her Consumerist interview:

“We make $3.50 an hour. Most of my paychecks are less than pocket change because I have to pay taxes on the tips I make,” she explains. “After sharing my tips with hosts, bussers, and bartenders, I make less than $9/hr on average, before taxes.

In her job, Chelsea says she skipped bathroom breaks when things got busy, went hungry when she had to work several tables at a time, would work until 1:30 a.m. and then come back in at 10:30 a.m.

“I am expected to portray a canned personality that has been found to be least offensive to the greatest amount of people,” she tells Consumerist. “I come home exhausted, sore, burnt, dirty, and blistered on a good day. And after all that, I can be fired for ‘embarrassing’ someone who directly insults their server on religious grounds.”

So, Applebee’s, there’s the real reason I’m mad at you. You did an awful thing to Chelsea, but you also do awful things everyday to the thousands of other people who work for you. 

Tell Deepak Chopra Not To Cross a Picket Line Tomorrow

(Click on his picture to go to his contact page and send him a message!)

The yoga publication Yoga Journal will be holding its annual convention this weekend at the under-boycott Hyatt Regency San Francisco. They’ve refused to change venues despite the ongoing appeals of workers and union organizers. (Check out the full story published yesterday on It’s All Yoga, Baby and read more about the boycott at Hyatt Hurts). 

That means conference attendees and faculty will spend 5 days walking past picketing workers to attend their workshops and presentations. 

I’ve never done yoga, but I can’t imagine that such callousness toward injustice fits in with any yogic worldview.  

Among the presenters at the conference will be popular philosopher, writer, and ostensibly-good-guy Deepak Chopra.

Chopra runs a large charity, writes and talks about peace, meditation, and love, and says things like, “The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.” 

So it’s strange that he is completely ignoring the fact that he’ll be walking through a picket line this Friday to give his presentation on enlightenment.

I’ve personally sent Chopra a complaint and I hope you will too. Tell him that fighting injustice is part of seeking truth and enlightenment, and ask him to respect the boycott and write a letter in support of Hyatt workers. You can email him here, or send him a tweet here. 

Organizing the Super-Low-Wage Working Poor

I did an interview last week on Boston NPR’s Boston Public Radio with host Callie Crossley. Listen here. 

We talked about the dire state of things for workers in super-low-wage industries such as retail and fast-food, and the exciting steps these workers are taking to improve their jobs and create a new labor movement. Steps like OURWalmart, Fast Food Forward, Restaurant Opportunity Center’s Dignity at Darden campaign, and UNITE HERE’s Hyatt Hurts campaign. 

It’s a bit scattered but I think I get some good stuff in. 

I was lucky to be on alongside Harvard Professor and Super Organizer Marshall Ganz 

And UMASS Lowell Professor Robert Forrant

And here’s the link to the interview one more time. 

Two Sweet Free Apps for Supporting Hotel and Restaurant Workers

Last month I posted an article on some frightening new apps designed to help bosses and consumers monitor and control service workers. Since then our side has released two apps that do the opposite: support hotel and restaurant workers by encouraging customers to frequent pro-worker businesses. 

People often say to me, “Just tell me which hotels/restaurants treat people well and I’ll go to them.” These apps will do exactly that for you! 

Restaurant Opportunities Center’s Diners’ Guide App

Every year Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), a national workers’ center fighting for restaurant workers’ rights, releases a “Diners’ Guide to Ethical Eating.” The guide examines over 150 popular restaurants in 9 major US cities and rates their labor practices in a number of categories—such as “Wages,” “Benefits,” and “Promotion Opportunities”—to determine whether or not each restaurant is treating it’s employees fairly. ROC discusses each restaurant’s results in every category then gives the business an overall labor practices rating. 

Such guides already exist for diners’ who want to eat local or organic, and ROC hopes their guide will add workers’ rights to the list of factors socially conscious consumers consider when eating out.

There’s benefits for workers and customers alike: good working conditions means happy workers who provide great service. Pay special attention to which restaurants provide workers’ with paid sick days, assuming you don’t want ill servers and cooks sneezing on your food.

ROC has put out the guide for years, but this is the first time they’ve made it into an app. The program allows you to search for restaurants based on city, price, and by varying degrees of good treatment for workers. It lets you easily determine where you can go to eat, in ROC’s words, “knowing that your server can afford to pay the rent and your cook isn’t working while sick.” Download the app for free here. 

UNITE HERE’s Union Hotel Guide App

UNITE HERE, the hospitality workers’ union, has released a similar app this year designed to help customers support union hotels. 

It works almost exactly like ROC’s program. You can search by city and price range, and the app tells you which hotels you should avoid because they are under boycott or highly exploitative, and which hotels you should support because workers have already secured decent treatment through a union contract. 

As the union explains, the app will benefit customers as well as workers:

“Strikes or boycotts could impact a guest’s quality of hotel service. Staying at a union hotel free of dispute guarantees that customers are going to receive top notch service and a better night’s sleep. When workers are treated fairly they are able to deliver excellent service that customers deserve.”

Download it for free here. 

3 Scary New Apps for Spying on Hotel and Restaurant Workers

(photo: Hyatt’s housekeeper spying app)

Managers surveilling their workers is nothing new, but recent technology is encouraging an unprecedented intrusion into employees’ privacy and control of their work. Mobile devices in particular are giving employers the ability to monitor a worker’s every movement.

This is the stuff Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor dreamt about.

1. Hyatt’s Housekeeper/Dog GPS App

Here’s a system Hyatt recently rolled out at their Andaz West Hollywood Hotel. Every housekeeper has to carry around an iPod touch, all of which are linked to monitoring computers in the manager’s office. The boss can observe the movements of every housekeeper in the hotel without having to leave their desk. 

Housekeepers have to track their productivity on the devices. They hit a “Start” button when they enter a room and an “End” button when they finish. If they aren’t working fast enough, managers see it in real time from a central location and offer up warnings through the Ipod.

When a housekeeper finishes a room the system automatically assigns their next room. The problem is that the system doesn’t account for where the housekeeper is in the hotel, so rooms are often assigned on the opposite side of the hotel, requiring workers to move heavy carts and equipment over long distances. Cathy Youngblood, a housekeeper at the hotel, remarked that “Whoever designed this system has not done hotel housekeeping…They may be a business major, and they may be a very good business major, but they have not done hotel housekeeping at Hyatt Andaz.”

It gets worse. Hyatt designed the system so that housekeepers are represented on the screen by a cartoon dog. I’m sure Hyatt claims this was meant to be cute, but it’s obvious to anyone with a wage-job why being depicted as a dog would be highly offensive. If they weren’t being intentionally malicious, Hyatt’s obliviousness shows how little consideration they give their employees.

Fortunately, workers at the Hyatt Andaz West Hollywood are unionized with UNITE HERE. They’re pursuing an NLRB lawsuit because the hotel violated their union contract in implementing the system. But there’s nothing protecting non-union hotel workers from this degrading invasion of privacy.

2. Server Review Apps

Everyone in the service industry knows the customer is a second boss. Customers watch you more closely than your real boss, and a simple customer complaint can result in being disciplined or fired. Plus, for food and beverage workers the customer dictates the majority of your pay through tips.

There’s a new type of employee-rating app that gives customers even more control over workers.

One is the Tip Card. It allows customers to rate individual servers, just as they now rate overall restaurants on sites like Yelp. Customers find out the server’s name, add them to the Tip Card database, then type in their pros and cons along with an explanation of why the customer did or didn’t leave a large tip. 

The app gives already entitled restaurant customers an even more disgusting amount of power over workers. It also gives the real boss more authority because the Tip Card’s database is available to anyone with the app, so restaurant managers can easily use it to monitor servers. Every customer becomes a security camera.

(photo: real time server monitoring w/ the Waiter Rater app) 

Going a step beyond the Tip Card is the Waiter Rater. It does everything Tip Card does, but it allows customers to give servers passive-aggressive feedback in real time. Take a look at the screen shot above: the idea is that customers leave their iPhone on the corner of their table and regularly adjust their server’s tip percentage based on how well the meal is going.

Read More

12 Easy Rules For Not Sucking When You Go To a Restaurant

A lot of people have no idea how to go to restaurants. Our latest video can help. Look below for more complete descriptions of each rule.  

Written by Joey L DeFrancesco. Shot and edited by Jori Ketten. 

Cast: Couple—Ben Nadler and Jamie Sarfeh. Server—Hannah Zoll

HOW TO NOT SUCK WHEN YOU GO TO A RESTAURANT 

1. Don’t show up 15 minutes before closing

Showing up late is one of the most annoying things you can do. We’ve just worked a 10 hour shift and now we have to stay an extra hour just for you. Because of you, we can’t do our cash-out, we can’t clean up, we can’t do our sidework, and we can’t see our friends and families or go to our second job for another hour.

You might say , “Oh don’t you want more money?” Well, maybe if you’re going to tip us $100, but most likely you’re going to spend $30 and tip us $5. Most restaurant workers make sub-minimum wage, often as low as $2.13/hr, so even with your $5 we’re still below minimum wage for the hour.

So, when you see that closing time, assume that’s when the restaurant shuts down and you have to be gone. That means show up at least an hour before closing if you want to sit down for a meal.

2. Know how many people are in your party when you’re being seated.

It really slows things up when you keep adding people or when you say “Oh I’m not sure how many will be coming.” How are we supposed to seat you?

3. Don’t name drop

Everyone knows the owner. Nobody cares. Plus, we probably hate the owner. Why should we have to work harder to make you feel special and keep up the owner’s social network.

Read More

The Restaurant Industry’s Sexual Harassment Epidemic

Update 10/2: Here’s yet another case in the news, this time out of Ottawa. 

A few weeks ago we posted our “Shit Restaurant Managers Say” video, attacking restaurant managers for, among other things, their regular sexual harassment of female workers. A viewer sent me the story below in response to the video. It might seem like an extreme example to outsiders, but those in the business know these terrifying stories are the norm. It’s hard to find anyone in the industry who hasn’t repeatedly experienced or witnessed harassment. 

MSNBC reported last year that while 9% of the population works in restaurants, a staggering 37% of federal sexual harassment suits were filed by restaurant employees. They also cited a poll from Louisiana stating that 42% of female restaurant workers had at some point been sexually harassed. The EEOC itself says that restaurants are the single largest source of sexual harassment claims. Add those statistics to the anecdotal evidence and the constantly growing list of high profile cases and you get an idea of how huge a problem this is.

So, again, this is just one example of something that’s happening everyday in innumerable kitchens across the country.

By Teresa, Restaurant Server

I watched your video about restaurant managers. It‘s very funny and so true. I also worked in an Italian restaurant and got to hear the same stupid things from my boss. I was working at the bar and he liked to stand behind me, watching me work, coming very close and saying disgusting stuff. Not to mention his love for flipping coffee beans into my décolleté…

One evening I missed the last bus home, so I had to accept his offer to drive me home in his car. It had been a very very hot day and my bar was right next to the stone oven, so I was wearing short pants of course. As soon as I got into the car and he started driving, I really regretted it. He said that I had very beautiful legs and then began touching them. I was terrified, because he could have done anything to me in this car. But I got out as soon as we reached the next underground station and quit the next day.

Your video reminded me of that time and it‘s sad to see that restaurant managers are the same anywhere you go.

Click here for information on how to file a sexual harassment suit.