Laurie Zabawa says she’d been working at a Hilton Garden Inn in Bozeman, Montana, for seven years when the owners outsourced the management of the hotel in 2012. For Zabawa, the hotel’s banquet manager, this meant that any parties that took place in the hotel would now be overseen by an outside firm, an Ohio-based company called Gateway Hospitality Group.
The banquet workers whom Zabawa oversaw weren’t being let go, so the service-industry lifer says she took the change in stride — that is, until Gateway explained the new policy on gratuities.
By tradition, when clients of the hotel ran up banquet tabs, they’d be subject to an automatic gratuity of 18 to 20 percent. That money was then distributed among the waiters, bartenders and other food workers who handled the event, according to Zabawa. For workers earning close to minimum wage, these tips could equal half their base pay, and they were essential to making a living.
But according to Zabawa and a lawsuit she’s filed in Montana state court, after Gateway took over, the automatic gratuity was renamed a “service” or “setup” fee, and the house stopped distributing that money to staff. Zabawa claims that workers were told to sign papers accepting a new flat wage that didn’t include gratuities. Most workers were given a nominal raise of about $1 per hour, but it didn’t come close to making up for the lost tips, she says.
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After workers lost their tips, one of the servers brought the language of the Montana statute to Zabawa, she claims in her lawsuit. Zabawa, in turn, took the server’s concerns to a manager for Gateway. Zabawa alleges in her suit that she was then instructed to “write up” the “problem employee” and fire her. Zabawa says she refused.
Zabawa says she then lost her position as banquet manager and was switched to a sales job. In her lawsuit, she argues that leaving “was the only reasonable alternative” at that point. Under Montana law, such a voluntary termination could still be considered wrongful discharge if the employer created an intolerable situation.
After eight years at the hotel, Zabawa wound up working part-time at Pier 1 Imports before finding a new job in banquet work. Her income has taken a sharp drop, she says, but that’s something she’s managed to live with.
“I go to sleep at night knowing that I’m not apologizing [to my employees] and that I’m not sorry every day,” she said.In the service industry, it’s become fairly common for the house to present customers with a charge that’s implied to be a tip for the workers — only to turn around and keep that money for itself.
