Dems urge Labor chief to delay new rule on workers’ tips

House Democrats are calling on Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta to give the public more time to comment on a proposal to roll back the Obama-era rule that banned employers from pooling workers’ tips.

In a letter Monday, 46 Democrats including Rep. Bobby Scott (Va.), Keith Ellison (Minn.) and Mark Takano (Calif.) asked Acosta to extend the current 30-day comment period to 60 days.

The Labor Department issued a proposal earlier this month to change the Fair Labor Standards Act regulation and allow employers to pool the tips of workers who make the minimum wage and share them with non-tipped workers. 

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The Democrats said the proposed rule would allow employers to pocket employee tips or redistribute them among employees, reversing the department’s more than 40-year position that tips are the property of the employee who earns them.

The proposed rule is expected to impact nearly 1.3 million tipped workers, but only those who make the standard minimum wage. Workers who make less than the minimum wage and rely on tips to supplement their pay were not part of the proposed rule.

The Democrats said the Labor Department failed to provide a quantitative analysis of the costs and benefits of the rule change. Extra time, they said, is needed to give those impacted by the rule time to provide meaningful input.

The National Restaurant Association has been fighting hard for the rule change to eliminate what it has said is a pay disparity between servers in the front of the house who receive tips and staff in the kitchen who do not.

“We applaud the Department of Labor’s review of tip regulations,” Angelo Amador, the group’s executive director, said in a statement when the proposed rule was released earlier this month.

“We look forward to submitting comments from the restaurant industry on the new rulemaking.”