Tip tip hooray!

Like pulling at a loose thread, once the tipping abuse scandal broke it wasn’t long before it all started to unravel for some of the UK’s biggest restaurant chains.

Unite’s campaign, launched in late May, to get Pizza Express to drop the 8 per cent admin fee it was skimming off tips paid on a card lifted the lid on the murky world of tips and service charges.

A number of high street family favourites from Giraffe to Strada were revealed to be doing the same in a series of newspaper investigations.

After a summer of intense media scrutiny the cracks started to show. First to crumble was the Tesco-owned family friendly chain of restaurants, Giraffe which vowed to scrap its 10 per cent admin fee on card tips in late August.

Ask, Zizzi, Byron Burgers and in a major coup the Casual Dining Group owners of Bella Italia, Belgo and Café Rouge have all since bowed to public pressure pledging to do away with their admin fees and hand 100 per cent of tips to staff.

Cote Brasserie which was accused of pocketing a big chunk of the service charge automatically added to bills, instead of giving it to staff, caved in to pressure in mid-October announcing that it will scrap the unfair policy.

Tremendous victory
It’s been a tremendous victory for our fair tips campaign, even prompting the business secretary, Sajid Javid to act. His investigation into abuse of tipping was launched on 30 August and closes on November 10.

But what all these reports revealed is a confusing array of tipping policies that have left customers and staff alike baffled.

It is this confusion and lack of clarity that is at the heart of the problem. Customers tip in good faith believing that the tip they leave will go to staff.

But even asking your waiter whether they get the tip is not always straightforward with some told to lie to customers about where the money goes.

Refusing to play fair
Italian restaurant chains Prezzo and Strada are still refusing to get abroad the fair tips’ ship. Both swipe a sizable 10 per cent slice of card tips as an admin fee. Bill’s, is another outlier involved in a similar service charge snatching rouse to the one that Cote was caught out in.

Earlier this month, the Observer reported that Wahaca – the Mexican street-food restaurant chain founded by Master Chef winner Thomasina Miers was revealed to make waiting staff hand over a percentage of sales (3.3 per cent) from card tips at the end of each shift, regardless of whether they had made enough in tips to cover the levy. A similar practice was uncovered at Jamie Oliver’s chain Jamie’s Italian, which deducts 2 per cent from a waiter’s sales.

Unlike, those chains accused of deducting an admin fee from card tips, both Wahaca and Jamie’s Italian say that they do not pocket any portion of staff tips- it is all distributed among front and back of house staff.

And to Jamie’s Italian’s credit, its tipping policy is clearly displayed on the company’s website which few others do. But when you have waiters complaining that the system can leave them out of pocket with one Wahaca waiter likening it to being asked ‘to pay rent to work’, it doesn’t seem very fair.

As one Unite member said: What I do object to, and seems to be an industry wide practice, even with the fairer systems coming in, is that the percentage gets taken regardless of the tips I actually earn. They can even ask me for cash out of my pocket.

“What I believe would be a fairer system is that something like 20% of the tips I actually make get tipped out to the other departments. Admin fees need to be legally scrapped. “

‘New’ tipping scandal
Skimming off staff tips is nothing new, Unite has campaigned long and hard for fair tips, way back in 2008 we won a change in the law, closing a loophole that allowed restaurants to use tips to top up wages to the legal minimum.

At the time we warned that the 2009 voluntary Code of Best Practice, introduced to bring justice to restaurant workers, would not be enough to stop unscrupulous employers coming up with new scams to cream off customers tips. We have been proved right.

Now we need the government to use its investigation, which closes on November 10 to stamp out these rip off practices once and for all. Making restaurants display their tipping and service charge policies would be a start, and bring clarity and transparency to customers and staff alike.

You see the problem is that tips paid by card and service charges are the property of the employer, not the waiter. As they own them they can do what they like with them.

It is this which makes it perfectly legal for employers to dip into to tips to cover everything from breakages, till shortages and customers who walk out without paying, as well as charging an ‘admin fee’ – however ethically dubious these practices may be.

It’s one of the reasons why Unite has been urging customers to tip in cash. But a better way would be to give staff 100 per cent ownership rights over customers’ tips with complete control over how they are distributed. We will be calling for this in our submission to the government’s consultation.

According to Dave Turnbull, Unite regional officer, a good place to start would be with an immediate review of the 2009 Code of Best Practice, which was developed with industry stakeholders.

Turnbull also wants to see ‘tronc’ schemes – the electronic tips’ pool method favoured by those restaurants involved in the admin fee scandal – to be genuinely independent from employer interference, run by staff for staff.

To tip or not to tip?
Perhaps we should get rid of tips altogether? Now a top New York restaurant group has done just that, announcing that it will ban tipping in its 12 restaurants. Could this be the solution to our tipping woes?

Dave Turnbull said, before we can even consider abolishing tipping, the UK hospitality industry needs to get its act together and start paying workers a wage they can live on – a proper living wage – not the government’s sham living national wage. It’s what our members tell us they want.

Better pay would solve a many of the industry’s woes as well. According to reports, the UK’s multi-billion restaurant industry is losing £274m a year because of its failure to retain and recruit staff. 350,000 workers are driven out of the industry each.

Pay staff properly
Turnbull is adamant that responsible employers should pay their staff properly. They deserve nothing less. Sadly, too many in the industry are taking customers for granted by using their tips to subsidise low pay.

Turnbull added: Trying to survive on the minimum wage is tough – really tough. “I’ve heard from workers well into their thirties, working 60 plus hours a week, forced to share a room with three or four others because they can’t even afford to rent a room of their own.

Tips are a vital lifeline –used to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Banning bad tipping practices is a start, but a decent wage would be better. Because let’s face it being forced to rely on tips is a drag.

Not only is it very precarious with no guarantee of what your tip earnings will be from week to week, but it also means the your holiday pay and other work entitlements from redundancy to maternity pay are based on the minimum wage, leaving people seriously out of pocket when they need it most.

Paying staff a living wage could set the UK on a path that sees tipping become a thing of the past on this side of the pond as well, according to Turnbull. Until that time, Unite will keep up the fight for decent pay and fair tips.

• Work in the hospitality sector? Rely on tips to boost low pay? Then we want to hear from you. Please share you story at: http://www.unitetheunion.org/campaigning/fair-tips-for-waiting-staff/fair-tips-your-story/