Paul DeCamp, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC office, was quoted in Medill on the Hill, in “New Labor Department Proposal Could Cause Increased Wage Theft, Inequality,” by Maggie Harden.
Following is an excerpt:
A controversial Department of Labor proposal could cost service workers billions of dollars in tips, experts say — and female service workers would be hit the hardest. The proposal has met harsh criticism, and earlier this month, the agency’s inspector general announced his office is reviewing allegations that Labor officials buried unfavorable economic analyses of the plan. …
The proposal, made in December, would reverse an Obama-era regulation that restricted tip pooling to only front-of-the-house workers such as servers, hosts and bartenders. Some legal experts, including National Restaurant Association lawyer Paul DeCamp, who was a senior Labor Department official under President George W. Bush, say the Obama-era rule directly violates a 2010 statute that says tip-pooling regulations only apply when an employer does not pay the federal minimum wage. …
Others, however, say the Labor Department has properly fulfilled its obligation to estimate the effects of its proposals.
“Certainly the department has met that burden,” DeCamp said. “One of the things the department did not do is try to calculate to the penny exactly what the effects of the regulation are going to be, and the department was very candid that trying to quantify the effects of this regulation would require making judgments about a lot of factors that are pretty unpredictable.”
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