EDMONTON—A local chef and former restaurant owner is fed up with servers having to sacrifice their tips.

Daniel Huber, known as theBurlyChef on Twitter, has launched a social media campaign to end house tipping to “non-working owners” — that is, the practice of servers paying a percentage of their earnings each day to owners who don’t double as staff.

“I unfortunately have heard too many friends wind up in these situations,” Huber said.

“It boggles my mind it’s still going on in 2018.”

Huber owned Pourhouse on Whyte Avenue before selling it three years ago, and has worked as a consultant for restaurants since.

He does not take issue with servers sharing a portion of their tips with cooks and other working staff members, but rather with servers being forced to pay owners who do not physically work in the establishment.

When he assembled a team of servers to help him at a K-Days event last month, and said he heard from many of them that the practice is still common in Edmonton restaurants.

He said it’s been happening since he started in the industry 20 years ago, but now owners are asking for more than they used to. Some restaurants, he said, expect servers to pay out as much as seven per cent of their total food sales each day.

“House tips are especially nefarious because they’re not only not just taxing you on the amount you had left over — so if you had a really terrible day and you had a lot of people not tipping you well and you only made $100 on $2,000, they’re making you pay seven per cent on the $2,000, not on the $100 you have left,” he said.

“So there are situations in a lot of places where servers are paying to essentially work, or they’re losing most of their tips.”

Some restaurant owners have complained about Alberta raising its minimum wage, since the NDP government announced plans to hike it from $10.20 in 2015 to $15 by October 2018, saying it would force them to cut staff.

Huber said some restaurants have used that as an excuse to make servers pay more, which he feels is unfair, especially when some newer restaurants are paying living wages and sharing tips in a more equitable way.

“There’s a lot of really good examples of places that are doing it right, and then there’s a lot of examples of the dinosaurs that are still holding onto the old model, which is bleeding the staff for as much money as they possibly can,” he said.

Huber said it’s hard for servers to speak out about house tipping for fear of losing their job, and Alberta labour board complaints can be time consuming.

He went through the complaint process years ago and said the wait list was several months long.

Alberta Labour Minister Christina Gray responded to Huber’s concerns on Twitter, inviting him to sit down and talk about tip-outs.

In a statement to StarMetro, Gray said she encourages workers who feel they are being mistreated to reach out to her office. She said the province hired an additional 32 employment standards officers this year alone to address long wait times for complaints.

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“Our government has the backs of working people and we believe that those who work hard should make a fair wage,” Gray said.

Tips and gratuities are not considered wages and are not regulated in Alberta, which is similar to most provinces.

Quebec is the only province that does not allow owners to enforce tip sharing unless the employees voluntarily consent to it.

British Columbia has rules preventing employers from using tips to cover a business cost.

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