Chapter 20 — Further Reading

Employment Law and Compliance: Wage and Hour, the Tip Credit, Overtime, and Harassment

How to use this list. Employment law is the one area of this book where a reading list is not a substitute for a professional. Read these to become a competent client — someone who knows what to ask, what to hand over, and when to pick up the phone. Then hire an employment attorney licensed where your restaurant sits. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and any specific figure you encounter in any of these sources should be checked against its date.

Tier 1 — Verified canonical

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and its implementing regulations. The federal baseline for minimum wage, overtime, recordkeeping, the tip credit, and the white-collar exemptions. The Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division publishes plain-language fact sheets on each of these topics — tipped employees, the executive exemption, recordkeeping, hours worked — and they are genuinely well written for a lay reader. Read the fact sheets on tipped employees, on overtime for salaried employees, and on hours worked, in that order. Check the revision date on every one; the tip and exemption materials in particular have been revised repeatedly.

The 2018 federal tip provisions. The March 2018 statutory amendment to the FLSA that prohibits employers, managers, and supervisors from keeping employees' tips for any purpose, and that permits mandatory tip pools including traditionally non-tipped employees where no tip credit is taken. Case Study 20.1 walks the history. The Department of Labor's subsequent implementing rules and the ongoing rulemaking on non-tip- producing work are where the current detail lives — check the current state of the "dual jobs" question specifically, because it has moved more than once.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC's guidance on harassment, its explanation of the charge process, and its small-business resources are all free and are the right starting point for an operator writing a first policy. The EEOC's 2016 Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace produced a report on workplace risk factors and prevention that is directly relevant to restaurants and is worth reading in full rather than in summary.

Form I-9 and the Handbook for Employers (M-274). U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services publishes both the form and a detailed employer handbook covering completion, acceptable documents, timing, retention, and — critically — the practices that constitute document abuse. Read the sections on what you may not ask for at least as carefully as the sections on what you must collect. Introduced in Chapter 17; applied here in §20.9.

Your state labor department and your city's labor standards office. This is the single most important entry on the page and the one most operators skip. Your state agency publishes the actual minimum wage, tipped wage, overtime rules, meal-and-rest requirements, wage-notice forms, and recordkeeping periods that apply to you. Cities with predictive-scheduling or paid-sick-leave ordinances publish their own compliance guides and, usually, model notices. Bookmark both. Re-read both every January.

Roger Fields, Restaurant Success by the Numbers. For the labor-cost context this chapter's compliance obligations sit inside — how the labor line is built and what it can absorb.

Danny Meyer, Setting the Table. For the argument that the way you treat the people in the building is the business model rather than a constraint on it. Read it alongside Case Study 20.2, which examines his company's compensation experiment and its reversal.

Brown and Rowe, The Restaurant Manager's Handbook. A reference-desk treatment of restaurant employment administration — forms, policies, and process. Use it as a checklist source, not as legal authority, and check its edition date.

Tier 2 — Attributed, specifics unverified

Employment-law firm client alerts aimed at hospitality. Most large employment firms publish free hospitality-sector alerts when a wage rule, a tip rule, or an exempt threshold changes. Subscribe to two or three. They are written to generate business, which means they are timely, readable, and appropriately alarming — and they will tell you about a change months before your payroll provider does. Treat the analysis as an argument, not a holding.

The National Restaurant Association and your state restaurant association. State associations in particular track wage, scheduling, and licensing changes at the level that actually affects you, and many run compliance webinars and publish state-specific handbook templates. Their policy positions are advocacy; their compliance summaries are usually solid. Distinguish the two as you read.

Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational and wage data for foodservice. Useful for benchmarking what positions pay in your metro before you build a wage model. Ranges, not targets.

Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United) research on tipped work and harassment. Advocacy research from a worker-side organization, and it should be read as such. It has documented the relationship between tipped compensation and harassment exposure at length and has shaped the public debate. Treat the specific percentages as contested and the underlying pattern as real — which is exactly how §20.8 uses it.

Trade press coverage of the tipping debate — Eater, Restaurant Business, Nation's Restaurant News, and general business press. The 2015–2020 no-tipping experiments, the 2017–2018 tip rulemaking fight, and the spread of service charges are all well covered. Read several outlets on the same event; this is a topic where coverage carries a viewpoint.

Your payroll provider's compliance materials. Every major payroll and timekeeping vendor publishes minimum-wage tables, tip-credit calculators, and overtime guidance. They are convenient and they are frequently a few months behind. Useful for orientation, never for a decision. And note this specifically: your payroll provider is not your lawyer and its contract almost certainly says so. If it configures your system wrong, the wage liability is yours.

Insurance-broker material on employment practices liability insurance (EPLI). Ask your broker for the coverage form, not the brochure, and read the exclusions — wage-and-hour claims are commonly excluded or sub-limited. Bind it alongside the Chapter 8 insurance package.

Tier 3 — Illustrative / constructed

Everything below is built for teaching in this book and exists nowhere else. Do not cite any of it as authority, and do not treat any figure in it as a legal threshold.

• Bellwether, its 31-person roster, its \$1,550,000 revenue plan, its \$500,000 labor line, its \$570,461 bottom-up roster, and the \$70,461 gap between them.
• The hypothetical jurisdiction used throughout §20.2 and §20.3 — a \$12.00 general minimum, a \$7.50 tipped cash wage, and a \$4.50 tip credit. These are teaching numbers chosen because the arithmetic is clean. They are not any state's current law.
• Figure 20.1, the line cook's punch report and its \$1,060.70 week.
• Figure 20.2, the Saturday tip-pool distribution in both versions, and the \$15.00 and \$12.50 point values.
• Figure 20.3, the sous chef's classification file, and the conclusion that the exemption is not defensible as the job is currently built.
• Figure 20.4, the hypothetical scheduling ordinance, its \$53.00 Friday, and the \$5,928 annual estimate.
• Figure 20.5, the classification map, and Figure 20.6, the compliance calendar.
• The private-event invoice in §20.4 — 40 guests at \$65, a 20% service charge, and a 7% sales tax — and the \$36.40 difference between the service-charge and gratuity versions.
• Every liability figure in this chapter, including the \$44,680 of "savings," the \$178,720 of two-year exposure, the \$95,940 tip-credit value, and the \$27,000 of sous-chef overtime. All of it is illustrative arithmetic on constructed numbers, assuming a two-year lookback and liquidated damages equal to the unpaid wages — neither of which is automatic, and none of which is a prediction of any actual outcome.

The one thing to actually do

Book a two-hour meeting with an employment attorney before you hire your first employee, and bring five documents: your position list with proposed classifications, your draft handbook, your tip policy, your wage-notice and tip-credit-notice forms, and your timekeeping system's configuration screen. Ask them to price an annual review. Put it in the pre-opening budget and the operating budget as a line item, next to the hood cleaning.

It is the cheapest item in the right-hand column of the table in §20.6, and it is the only one that makes the rest of that column go away.