You had to clean the bathrooms?

Scrub floors and walls?

Clean the parking lots?

Clean the toilets?

 

Many customers are fortunate enough not to know that, at some restaurants, the person serving their food is the same person cleaning and restocking the bathrooms, cleaning and scrubbing the floors and walls, and scraping gum and cigarette butts off the patio floors.

 

It doesn't happen everywhere, but it happens more than it should. Many employers exploit the tip credit so they can pay their servers and bartenders half the wage they'd have to pay janitors to do the same kinds of work. It' s monumentally unfair, but restaurant employers do it all the time.

 

Don't let your employer fool you. They can't do to you that without paying you properly.

 

Under the FLSA, you are entitled to be paid the full minimum wage (rather than the low server rate) for ALL time spent performing non-tipped work that is unrelated to serving tables.