On workers' tips, Trump usually has favored employers

Zoom in: Trump's Labor Department pushed rules that restaurant owners favored, and that unions and other groups representing workers fought.

• The Trump administration set off a firestorm in 2017 when its Labor Department proposed allowing tipped employees to share, or "pool," their tips with coworkers who didn't get tips.
• Proponents of the 2017 plan argued it was a way to share the higher wages that servers make, thanks to tips, with lower-paid workers who don't deal with customers.
• Many tipped workers saw it as a pay cut and as a way for employers to control or even take their tips. Labor advocates called it "tip stealing."

Restaurants have wanted to get their hands on all the tip money coming into their establishments for years, says Heidi Shierholz, president of the progressive Economic Policy Institute. With Trump as president, "they finally found an administration that would do it for them."

• Casino magnate Steve Wynn, a longtime friend and ally of Trump, has long pushed for pooling tips in his casinos and was represented in a case over the issue by lawyer Eugene Scalia, who later became Trump's Labor Secretary.

State of play: Trump's pledge to eliminate taxes on tips has been politically potent. Republicans and Democrats are now embracing their own proposals — without providing many details on how they'd make up for hundreds of billions in lost tax revenue.

• Weeks after Trump announced his policy, Vice President Kamala Harris put forth her own no-tax-on-tips plan.
• Trump's hoping the plan will help him in swing states — particularly Nevada, home to an estimated 350,000 hospitality workers, many of whom receive tips. The Culinary Workers Union there endorsed Harris, however.

Between the lines: Like Wynn, many business owners favored Trump's pooling proposal because they saw it as a way to raise worker pay without having to shell out more money.

• That's partly why the restaurant industry likes Trump's latest proposal to eliminate taxes on tips.

Zoom out: The outcry over the tip-pooling rule grew so intense during the Trump years, with hundreds of thousands of comments on the Labor Department's website, that Congress stepped in.

• As part of a bigger bill in 2018, lawmakers clarified that employers could not take workers' tips.

• That law remains in force today. The rest of Trump's proposal — allowing workers to pool tips — is policy today as well.

Follow the money: Toward the end of his time in office, Trump's Labor Department made another move, again backed by the restaurant industry, that upset some tipped workers.

• The agency proposed doing away with the so-called 80-20 policy, a longstanding department guideline that says if tipped workers spend more than 20% of their time on work that doesn't earn tips — such cleaning and restocking — they have to be paid the full minimum wage, instead of the much lower minimum pay that tipped workers get.
• Restaurant owners wanted to get rid of 80-20 because it required them to track employees' time — and made the time workers spent on cleanup or restocking more expensive.
• Violations, considered wage theft, have cost employers in court settlements that have reached into the millions.

For the record: Trump's move against 80-20 never took effect, and President's Biden Labor Department re-instated and strengthened it in 2021. But it was challenged in court.

• Just last month, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated the rule nationwide.
• The Biden administration hasn't said whether it will appeal.

What they're saying: "President Trump's No Tax on Tips policy will keep money in the pockets of our great hospitality workers who've been greatly hurt by Kamala Harris' disastrous economic policies," Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told Axios.