Hans Riede Quoted in Law360 Article About Handling Tipped Workers After DOL Rule Struck Down by Federal Court

Hans Riede, co-managing partner of the Quarles & Brady Washington office and office chair of the Labor & Employment Practice Group, shared his insight in a Law360 article about considerations for employers with tipped workers after a federal circuit court struck down the U.S. Department of Labor’s 2021 tip credit rule.

The article addressed a variety of steps employers might take to ensure they are properly handling issues related to employees who receive tips. Riede spoke about the importance of ensuring potentially impacted roles are clearly defined.

An excerpt:

In place of the 80-20-30 rule, employers will look to what's known as the dual-jobs framework, first introduced in 1967, to guide their compliance efforts.

When a worker is employed in both a tipped role and a nontipped role, "an employer may only take a tip credit for the work performed by the tipped employee that is part of the employee's tipped occupation," according to the DOL's definition of dual jobs.

The problem with the 80-20-30 rule, as the appellate court put it in its opinion, is that it "applies the dual-jobs framework to disaggregate the component tasks of a single occupation."

Under the easier dual-jobs regime, each occupation is in its own lane, said Hans Riede, a partner with management-side firm Quarles & Brady LLP.

The question then becomes how those lanes are defined, he said.

"Just make sure that every tip job — bartender, server, whatever other tip jobs they have — that from the onboarding through, they have the bulleted job tasks," he said. "And managers should know that you're not going to pull the server in to fix the toilet."

For Riede, the best place to look to mitigate risk is the O*NET database, which has information on various occupations' characteristics.

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