Restaurant Using Server’s Tip Outs To Pay Other Employees Hourly Wage

Location: Wisconsin Hi everyone, recently the restaurant I serve at has had some complex issues regarding our tip outs. Servers are required to deduct a portion of our tips based on a percentage (2.5%) of our net sales (pre tax) which then goes into a “pool” that contributes to hourly wage of support staff (including bussers and back of house positions like dishwasher and expo). Regardless of factors such as busy nights, slow nights, high sales, low sales the support positions get a set hourly which is paid by server tips. In other words, the business itself contributes little to their wage. This tip out money is supposed to come out automatically through Toast, the point of sale/payroll system used.

Now to the tricky part, it came to light last night, this function in Toast was inactive since middle/end of January 2025 so no money was being deducted from all server’s tips. This is completely out of everyone’s control except for the person doing payroll (the owner in this case) We received a message from the owner stating everyone will be meeting with her to discuss repayment options and that no additional money will be deducted from our checks until there is a decision in writing. To make things even more interesting, this morning we received another message stating the tip out will be doubling and is now 5% of our net sales and some servers will receive an hourly pay increase.

I am wondering if any of this is actually legal and if fault lies on the servers affected? Are we legally obligated to pay back the money not deducted? Thank you in advance!!