Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill32
ilovtv, read between the lines.........if the restaurant association wants this bill sponsored it is not intended to benefit the servers it is to benefit them! This wasn't introduced by the workers! You would have to be a lawyer to decipher the laws they write in congress, keep it simple, if the Restaurants want this it's for their benefit only.
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This language in the text of the bill is not difficult to understand:
27 employer
may elect to guarantee that all such employees receive
28 a wage, including tips, equal to at least 130 percent of the
29 state minimum wage ($7.67 per hour) established pursuant to s. 448.110, Florida
30 Statutes, rounded up to the next cent.
So, this added, optional method of calculating the guaranteed tipped worker pay is 130% of $7.67, or $9.91 per hour including tips earned and any difference the employer would have to fill in if tips were insufficient to bring it up to the 130% of minimum.
A sample letter below by the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association explains that they back this proposed option as "a guarantee of
higher, stable wages to many of our tipped workforce"
that suffers with seasonal fluctuations, time of day, and the economy.
Everyone here knows that restaurant business gets slower and tip opportunities become less in the summer, and because of time of day, and because of consumers' belt tightening.
It's apparent that the bill is to guarantee a stable wage for servers who work in places where business fluctuates a lot, like at country clubs up north where lengthy periods of rain and mud can absolutely kill golf and the club restaurant business for weeks.
Full-time tipped workers cannot rely on tips in fluctuating situations like this and so some clubs pay an hourly wage higher than regular minimum wage, to lend income stability for slow weeks/seasons. Here in FL, we have obviously "high and low" seasons.
A FL example of why the bill is to guarantee higher pay is this: A few years ago, we went to an Outback a few miles from DisneyWorld in a residential area where friends rented a Disney vacation home. When we got our bill and were calculating our tip, the server told us "we get
regular minimum wage,
not the lower tipped minimum wage,
because it's hard to attract good servers with the way Disney pays them so much more per hour". He told us that in order to compete with Disney pay for servers, Outback was paying them more per hour. He also mentioned the difficulty with
seasonal fluctuations in business/tips.
According to the Bill Analysis I posted earlier
from the state legislative site (not political blogs and Huffington Post) it says clearly that tip money is to be claimed to fill in the difference from $2.13/hour and regular state minimum wage,
and "IF an employee’s tips combined with the employer’s direct (or cash) wages of at least $2.13 per hour do not equal the minimum hourly wage of (federal) $7.25 per hour,
the employer must make up the difference.......
So in other words, if a server's tips do not fill in the difference between $2.13 and FL minimum wage of $7.67, the employer has to fill that in and bring it up to 130% of minimum, under this new wage calculation
option the bill provides. This is a decent wage a server can count on every day he/she works, regardless of whether business is slow or nonexistent because of season or bad weather.
See this sample letter explaining the position of the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association....
Tipped Employee Sample Letter - Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association