Opinion

Fighting for tips in the hospitality industry

For any protest movement, it always helps if you've got a message simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker.

As more than 60 activists lined up Thursday afternoon in front of a City Hall metal detector to present a letter to a staffer for Mayor Julián Castro, there was no mistaking the message.

The activists — a coalition that included union leaders, clergy members, community organizers, and Linda Chavez Thompson, 2010 Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor (and herself a retired union leader) — had this to say to the local hospitality industry: Tip your workers or fess up to customers about it. (That's a bit long for a bumper sticker, but you get the point.)

Three months ago, Unite Here — a union that represents hospitality workers — stirred a mini-uproar with their so-called “Riverwalk Referendum.” The effort consisted of union volunteers carrying around ballot boxes and asking passersby to vote on whether or not they supported a municipal Tip Integrity Act (TIA) to protect the rights of hospitality employees. (Given that the final tally was 3,756 in favor of TIA and only three opposed, it's fair to assume that the Unite Here presentation was a wee bit slanted.)

The idea behind TIA is that banquet and large-group customers are being duped into thinking that their service-charge payments are covering the tips of workers, so they're not leaving additional tips. If their tips are simply going to be pocketed by downtown hotels and restaurants, Unite Here argues, customers should at least be informed about it.

It's an approach that's been adopted by the city of Los Angeles and six states in recent years. Most of these laws allow employers to use service charges as they choose, but require them to tell customers how those charges are being apportioned. The words “notification,” “disclose,” and “notice” consistently pop up in the language of legislation passed in Washington, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maine, Minnesota, and New York.

Unite Here has a history of targeting the Grand Hyatt-Riverwalk and other downtown hotels over working conditions for their employees, but during the Riverwalk Referendum they also began to hear from disgruntled banquet workers at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.

The convention center imposes a 20 percent banquet service charge on its customers for food and beverages, and some employees complain that those gratuities aren't going to them.

“When you consider that the city receives 23 percent of the food-and-beverage revenues from the convention center, it's basically a dollar-for-dollar transaction of customers paying (the city),” said Danna Schneider, organizing director for Unite Here.

Thursday's speakers kicked up plenty of moral outrage on the issue. You had Father Will Wauters, pastor of Santa Fe Episcopal Church, calling the service-charge policy a “stain on our community,” and declaring that “under the gauze of a service charge,” the hospitality industry is “pocketing the tips.”

Tom Johnson, a banquet server and bartender at the Grand Hyatt, said hotels and restaurants have chipped away at the service charge over his 30 years in the business, and created a “culture of fear” in which workers are afraid to tell inquiring customers that they don't get tips from the service charges.

Unions tend to get little sympathy — and plenty of outright hostility — in this right-to-work state, and union-driven demands are often marginalized on general principle before their merits are considered.

That's why it's not a bad idea to separate the TIA cause from its union trappings and think about what it represents: basic transparency that benefits customers as much as workers by letting them know if their assumed tip is really a tip.

Councilman Diego Bernal, whose district includes downtown, expressed optimism that the hospitality industry will work to find an agreeable solution.

“I believe there's an opportunity,” Bernal said, “for both sides to come to an agreement and show the city that two sides that are seemingly on opposite ends of the spectrum really can work together for the betterment of both the consumer and our hard-working hotel workers.”