Waiters and waitresses could take home significantly less money if a new rule proposed by the Trump administration in December passes, critics say.

Changes proposed by the Department of Labor on Dec. 5 would allow employers to legally pocket tips that servers earn at restaurants. The change, which would repeal part of a 2011 ruling that said employers could not pocket their workers’ tips, is meant to level a growing disparity between what tipped employees like servers earn compared with back-of-house employees like cooks. After the changes, employers could take all tips earned by servers and redistribute them to workers that are not tipped.

That sounds like a fair plan, in theory.

However, there is no guarantee employers would redistribute “pooled tips,” and critics say economic models show they will likely pocket them instead. “If this proposed rule were finalized, restaurant owners could pocket between $523 million and $14.2 billion — with $5.8 billion being the best estimate — in tips earned by tipped workers each year,” according to Economic Policy Institute economists Heidi Shierholz, David Cooper, Julia Wolfe, and Ben Zipperer.

And nearly 80% of the tips that would be taken from employees would come out of the pockets of female tipped workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. An economic analysis showing these negative effects of the change was scrubbed by the Department of Labor, a new report from the Economic Policy Institute reported, “showing the lengths to which the Trump administration ... will go to hide the fact that they are taking steps to actively make workers’ lives worse,” it said. (The Department of Labor did not respond to request for comment.)

“The big lie is that it will lead to restaurants sharing these tips with back of house,” said Shierholz, senior economist and director policy at the Economic Policy Institute. Instead, she said employers will “be able to control tips and take a big chunk of them as long as they pay the minimum wage.” The proposal would require staff to make minimum wage, but allow tips to be pooled beyond that. (A spokesman for the Department of Labor said it intends to publish “an informed cost benefit analysis as part of any final rule.”)

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The Economic Policy Institute said the Department of Labor did not provide estimates of the number of tips that would be shifted from employers to employees under the new ruling. The Department of Labor previously said the rule is out to comment and that stakeholders are encouraged to provide data on the economic effects of the proposal.

However, 12% of tipped workers had tips stolen by their employer or supervisor, according to a 2009 study from Center for Urban Economic Development, often leading to minimum wage violations. The ruling would also disproportionately affect non-white employees: White non-Hispanic tipped workers would lose $3.5 billion, Hispanic workers would lose $1.4 billion, black non-Hispanic tipped workers would lose $486 million, Asian workers would lose $391 million, and tipped workers who are of another race would lose $104 million, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Some restaurant workers say the Department of Labor changes are sorely needed as restaurants struggle to pay back-of-house workers like kitchen porters fairly in an industry with notoriously tight profit margins. “In order for back-of-house workers to receive annual increases, tip credit needs to remain in place,” said Joshua Chaisson, a server in Portland, Maine who has been involved in a grassroots campaign to undo similar legislation. Restaurants can then focus on increasing hourly wages, he said.

By his group’s estimations, removing the tip credit would require restaurants to increase hourly wages of servers by 220% as long as they still received the standard tip rate of 20% from most customers — an unsustainable amount of pay for restaurants. This rise in wages for servers has led to more restaurants closing and fewer jobs for people in the service industry, Chaisson argues.

But the EPI’s analysis suggested bigger profits would likely not be redistributed among workers, but rather go into the pockets of owners. To truly help back-of-house, low-income workers, wages need to be increased and employers should not be allowed to take tips, she added. “There is far more incentive for them to pocket that money than to give it to employees,” she said.

The proposed rule is up for public comment until Feb. 3. A spokesperson for the Department said “stakeholders are encouraged to provide data on the economic effects of the proposal.”