The new year brings with it a renewed agenda for the federal government’s approach to U.S. labor laws.
The U.S. Department of Labor and other federal labor-related organizations will all take actions and make decisions this year that will affect workplace rules and operations. In a podcast interview, Sylvia St. Clair, partner in the labor and employment group at law firm Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath, said “it’s been an interesting last couple of months,” referring to its opinion letters interpreting the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Opinion letters from the Labor Department are issued fairly regularly, but there hadn’t been many for a while and then several arrived suddenly in 2025, St. Clair said. One deals with tip pooling, which is the practice of employers pooling and sharing tips among eligible employees. Another focuses on joint-employer status among separate companies with an employee who works for both.
In the tip-pooling opinion letter, the Labor Department reviewed whether front-of-house oyster shuckers at seafood restaurants are considered eligible employees along with servers, bartenders and other typically tipped workers.
The acting wage and hour administrator stated there’s a rule to consider as to whether a shucker is someone who would customarily receive tips, she said. It also asks whether they're engaging in the type of service with regular interaction with customers that would qualify them to regularly share in that tip.
“Ultimately, the department agreed that for our purposes for tip pooling, oyster shuckers in the front of the house may participate in tip pooling,” she said.
The joint-employer opinion letter dealt with a hostess who worked in the restaurant operations of a hotel as well as at a members’-only lounge on another floor, St. Clair said. The issue at hand was if the two were found to be a joint-employer of the hostess, it would affect the hourly employee’s overtime calculations.
The two entities tried to argue they were separate legal companies, had different payroll systems and different time-keeping systems, so the Labor Department should not consider them as a joint employer, she said. The Labor Department disagreed.
“They said that what they look at is not necessarily corporate formalities, but instead they look at shared management and ownership,” she said. “They looked at the fact that the hostess was working in both locations. There was some type of coordination in scheduling. There were similar/identical rates of pay. In all essence, they were operating as one entity.”
Minimum wage increases
Federal changes aren’t the only things in store for hotel employers this year. The federal minimum wage remains at $7.25 per hour for non-tipped employees, but there are at least 19 states that have increased their own minimum wage amounts as of Jan. 1.
“One thing that's really important for employers to pay attention to is that it's not just the states, but what we're seeing more and more is that cities and counties now have their own minimum wage,” she said.
The means having to pay attention to the federal minimum wage as well as state and, if applicable, local minimum wages if they are higher than the state or federal levels, she said. That also means taking into account minimum wage levels for employees eligible for the tip credit.
For more from Sylvia St. Clair on newer developments in U.S. labor laws, listen to the podcast episode embedded above.