Many employers use a "tip pool," which is a system of
collecting all tips earned by workers and redistributing them to a
pool of workers. Employers using tip pools have had to take care
not to include "non-tipped" workers, including
back-of-house staff like cooks and dishwashers, when tip pooling as
this violated wage and hour law. Now, there are new and potential
changes to the tip-pool rules.
Under the Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Labor
(DOL) finalized a new rule that would have offered employers more
flexibility in who could be included in the tip pool, and would
have narrowed potential liability for willful violations. The rule
was originally scheduled to take effect March 1, 2021, but the
Biden administration's DOL pushed its effective date to April
30, 2021. On March 23, 2021, the DOL announced that it will proceed
with the new rule in three different ways: allowing a portion of
the rule to take effect on April 30, and announcing two Notices
