Employees of a BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse location in Modesto, California, are pushing to unionize over the company’s tip-sharing policy.
The policy, which went into effect last year, entitles kitchen staff and untipped front-of-house workers like hosts and bussers to 4% of the restaurant’s total sales. Servers and bartenders have said that the practice cuts into their earnings because when customers don’t tip, the share of that transaction is taken out of their pay.
The tip-sharing policy is in effect only at BJ’s California locations. The company is based in Southern California, and about 60 of its more than 200 units are in the state…