John Williams, Unite hospitality member
1 October will no doubt become ‘Fair Tips Day’ for hospitality workers. Unite members are out campaigning, talking to hospitality workers about the new law on tips.
Before 1 October, employers were under no legal obligation to allow their workers to keep all of their tips. The Employment (Fair Allocation of Tips) Act changes that. The new law states that workers must receive “100% of tips”, “fairly distributed’ with a “clear policy” for customers and staff to see.
This is a big issue in restaurants, where a service charge is common, and many customers give tips. I’m sure customers would have had something to say if they found out that not all of the tips went to the workers. The bosses certainly wouldn’t tell them!
This change in the law has been a long time coming, with Unite the Union campaigning on the issue for more than a decade. In 2018, Unite Hospitality members at TGI Fridays took historic strike action to win a fairer tips policy. In 2022, workers at Cameron House resort in Scotland won back £138,000 in unpaid tips and service charges, when it was discovered that the employer had not been transparent or fair with distribution.
Unite estimates that this new law will put an extra £300 million a year into the pockets of workers in one of the lowest-paid industries in the UK. However, the code of practice doesn’t go far enough. What is ‘fair’ and how the tips are divided should be determined by the workers themselves, as Unite says, through democratically elected committees.
Legally, the bosses will still have the upper hand. Hospitality workers getting organised in a union will make a difference to collectively deciding what’s fair. This could become an issue with places like Miller and Carter steakhouses for example, where it has been reported that workers have to hand over tips on the basis of sales not actual tips, meaning some of its workers have been in ‘tip debt’ to the company!
We must also demand that workers are paid enough so that they don’t have to rely on tips. We have to fight for workers’ rights and demand that the Labour government bans youth pay rates, zero-hour contracts, and fire and rehire.
But precarious workers have little faith in Labour doing anything for us. If the government doesn’t deliver on workers’ rights, the Trades Union Congress has agreed to call a special conference. I’m looking forward to going to it with a bunch of hospitality workers.
