Wage and Hour Defense Blog

Our colleagues Kara Maciel and Jordan Schwartz, both of Epstein Becker Green, recently cowrote an article for PLC titled "Tipped Employees Under the FLSA."

Following is an excerpt:

Wage and hour lawsuits certainly are not new phenomena, but in recent years, service industry employees have increasingly made claims regarding tips and service charges. In particular, employers in states such as Massachusetts, New York and California have seen a surge in class actions involving compulsory tip pools and distributions of service charges to employees. Commonly targeted employers ...

By: Kara M. Maciel

The following is a selection from the Firm's October Take 5 Views You Can Use which discusses recent developments in wage hour law.

1. IRS Will Begin Taxing a Restaurant's Automatic Gratuities as Service Charges

Many restaurants include automatic gratuities on the checks of guests with large parties to ensure that servers get fair tips. This method allows the restaurant to calculate an amount into the total bill, but it takes away a customer's discretion in choosing whether and/or how much to tip the server. As a result of this removal of a customer's voluntary act, the ...

By William J. Milani, Dean L. Silverberg, Jeffrey M. Landes, Susan Gross Sholinsky, Anna A. Cohen, and Jennifer A. Goldman

The New York State Department of Labor (“DOL”) has adopted wage deduction regulations (“Final Regulations”) pertaining to the expanded categories of permissible wage deductions in the New York Labor Law, effective October 9, 2013. 

As we previously reported (see the Act Now Advisory entitled “New York State Releases Proposed Wage Deduction Regulations”), among other things, the Final Regulations (i) set forth information concerning the subset ...