Wyoming Tipped Minimum Wage
Posted by Tamara
Employers who own service establishments in Wyoming, such as a restaurant, can pay their hourly employees who are regularly tipped, a lower wage. This is
permitted under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 which governs the pay of service employees in Wyoming, since there is no state law addressing this issue.
The current federal minimum wage for such employees is $2.13 per hour. This rate applies to those employees who routinely receive at least $30 in tips each month. The regulations governing these workers are overseen by the United States Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division. The federal policies established by this agency require that the tipped workers be allowed to retain all of their tips unless there is an established and valid “tip pooling” policy in place.
Employers and salaried managers are not allowed to be paid out of the tip pool if the policy is to be considered valid under present law. However, if the establishment has a compulsory “service charge” which it adds to the customer’s bill on a routine basis then that revenue can be retained by the employer. In fact that income must be reported by the employer and taxes must be paid on the gross revenue. Beyond that, the employer is free to share this revenue with service workers as he or she determines.
Tipped workers may share their tips amongst themselves. This practice, generally referred to as “tip pooling”, occurs when all of the tips are gathered up and split between the servers. The major advantage in this practice is that it helps to eliminate unevenness in tips that can occur because of the location of service assignments.
Servers sometimes also “tip out” to others who support them as they serve. A bus person or bartender may not routinely have opportunity to receive as much in tips but their service does help the server receive more income from tips. Therefore, a bartender or bus person is often given a percentage of the tips received by the server. Most establishments set percentages for tipping out. A bus person might normally expect to receive 10% of a server’s total tips, a bartender might receive as much as 15% of the same.
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