It’s one thing if a restaurant, bar, or swanky club charges a fixed service fee to keep its waiters and bartenders from being stiffed by stingy tippers. It’s quite another if the good will customers feel toward their servers becomes an excuse for a surcharge that benefits someone else. But that’s what happened at the Harvard Club of Boston, according to employees who are suing in Suffolk Superior Court over a 17-percent food and beverage surcharge “in lieu of a gratuity’’ - a surcharge that workers say they didn’t receive.
To its credit, the Harvard Club of Boston, which is independent from the university, pays its servers well and offers them health care coverage to boot. But the 17-percent surcharge described in the suit surely plays on the habits of customers who are accustomed to tipping waiters a similar percentage. In doing so, it appears to violate a Massachusetts law under which the “total proceeds’’ of charges that look like gratuities must go to wait staff and other service workers. If it looks like a gratuity, it has to actually be one.
