TIPS: WHAT SERVICE EMPLOYEES NEED TO KNOW
If you receive tips as part of your compensation, you should know your legal rights.
The basic rule of tips is that they belong to employees, not the employer. Employees can’t be required to give their tips or any part of them to the company, except as part of a valid tip pooling arrangement — and even then, the tip pool must be divided only among certain other employees. The employer can’t be part of the pool.
It’s not as easy as you might think to figure out exactly how much of what a customer pays is a “tip.” For example, if the employer has to pay the credit card company a processing fee, California law requires that the employer has to give the employee the full tip indicated by the customer and pay the fee itself.
David Payab, Esq. from The Law Offices of Payab & Associates can be reached @ (818) 918-5522 or by visiting http://payablaw.com/
