Tipped Employee Protection Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. TITUS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to voice opposition to this bill, the Tipped Employee Protection Act.

Don't be fooled by the name of it. There is nothing proworker in this bill. It is like calling increased air pollution the blue sky initiative. This is just another attempt from my Republican colleagues to create loopholes that allow employers to get away with wage theft.

Anyone who has visited my district in downtown Las Vegas and the strip will know that our world-class hospitality workers are the magic behind the glitz and glamour. With the power of organized labor, casino workers, servers, line cooks, housekeepers, and others put Las Vegas on the map as a world-renowned hospitality center.

The tourism, gaming, and entertainment industries account for more than 315,000 jobs in our State. We have proven in Nevada that if you pay workers what they deserve, everybody wins.

I am especially proud that our State bans subminimum wages for tipped employees. That means, whether an employee has a good or a bad tipping month, an employee can still earn an honest living.

More needs to be done to support our workers. This is especially true as the Trump slump threatens our tourism economy and the Trump administration cuts vital safety nets like SNAP.

That is why I introduced the LIFT Act last year. It would raise the minimum wage and all subminimum wages to $17 an hour over the next 3 years with annual increases after that. In contrast, the bill before us today would change the definition of tipped employee in a manner that would allow employers to undercut wages.

Anybody in the service industry knows that tips vary from shift to shift. Under the current law, the definition of tipped employee accounts for those realities by stipulating that an employee must customarily and regularly--customarily and regularly--receive more than $30 a month in tips.

Yet, the bill we are considering today would allow employers to measure a worker's tips over just a single day of work. Employers could manipulate schedules and purposely choose to count days where workers get more tips in order to pay them less.

In 15 States, that means even more workers will be making just $2.13 an hour. That can't even buy a carton of eggs in Trump's economy, much less pay the rent. A more accurate name for this would be the employer profits protection act.

Mr. Speaker, I agree with my colleagues on this side of the aisle and urge everyone to stand up for workers and vote ``no'' on this bill.

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