Working Class Whites Watch: Day 334

Many political experts believe that Trump's victory last November was due mainly to his appeal to working class white voters.  We have made numerous observations about the ways in which Trump is screwing them sideways (not just working class whites, of course; the entire working class).  This may be the most egregious example yet:

The rule doesn’t actually require that employers share those tips with untipped staff. Under the proposal, employers can pocket those tips as long as workers earn the minimum wage. In fact, the Department of Labor all but openly acknowledges that the change could lead to this scenario: “The proposed rule rescinds those portions of the 2011 regulations that restrict employer use of customer tips when the employer pays at least the full Federal minimum wage.”

Yep.  Trump wants to make it perfectly legal for employers to scoop up their employees' tips and keep them for themselves, so long as the employees earn at least the minimum wage.  So that great waitressing job you have that only pays a base wage of $6.00/hr, but you get between $50-$100 tips each shift?  Well, now it's suddenly a minimum wage job.  Doesn't that seem like it will make America great?

And it gets better.  Many states have regulations preventing this kind of wage theft, so the only people who would really be affected would be those who work in states without this kind of burdensome regulation.  And so which states would get hit the hardest?  Kevin Drum has prepared a convenient map:

It sure looks like Trump is doing his damnedest to turn absolutely every state in the union blue in 2020, doesn't it?

Update: The full text of the proposed rule is available here, and it's a long, hard slog.  But this is the key paragraph:

Much of that litigation involves the application of the Department's 2011 tip credit regulations providing that an employer's ability to utilize tips received by its employees is restricted even when it has not taken a tip credit. In several cases, employees alleged that their employers, who had paid their tipped employees a direct cash wage of at least the Federal minimum wage, improperly retained some or all of the tips received by employees or mandated that they participate in a tip pool that included non-tipped employees. The proposed rule rescinds those portions of the 2011 regulations that restrict employer use of customer tips when the employer pays at least the full Federal minimum wage and does not claim a section 3(m) tip credit, likely reducing litigation in this area.

So you see, it's not really about screwing workers out of the tips they earned; it's about eliminating workers' ability to sue their employers when they get screwed out of the tips they earned.  What a laudable goal.

Fortunately, the government is accepting comments from the public on the proposed rule change.  You can leave your comments here.

Update: Okay, this isn't an accident.  The Trump administration knows damn well what it's doing, it knows that the rule change allows owners to take tip money out of workers' pockets, and it doesn't care.  More than that, it's doing everything it can to cover up what they're doing, as Kevin Drum reports.