Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, would love to see the taxman barred from the tip jar.
Pappageorge told The Post that between 18,000 and 20,000 of his local’s 60,000 members are tipped employees.
“There’s no other concentration of tip earners that are actually represented by a union like this anywhere else” in the nation, he said.
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Of greater value to tipped workers, Pappageorge said, would be to eliminate the federal “sub-minimum wage” of $2.13, where tips make up the difference between that and the $7.25 regular minimum, and just pay the regular minimum instead. Also helpful would be more sanity on the part of the IRS when the tax agency develops the “tip allocation rate,” its estimate of what tipped employees get in gratuities on which “they charge you taxes accordingly.”
Instead of setting a fixed allocation rate, the tax collectors should view tips “differently than wages,” he said. “We’re not saying no taxes, but we’re saying it’s different.”