How Staff at Scotland’s Poshest Hotel Won Back their Tips
After months of individual complaints being ignored, workers at Scottish hotel Cameron House organised together to get £138,000 in backdated tips back in their pockets – and through collective action, they won.
This week, it was announced that £138,000 in backdated tips would be put back into the pockets of over 200 workers employed there. (Getty Images)
Fair tips in this country are hard to come by. But for workers in hospitality, an industry widely associated with low pay and insecurity, tips matter. Research from Unite has found that tips can add another £200 a month to a worker’s take-home pay. That’s the difference between being able to get by and falling behind on essentials like rent, energy, and food—as so many are in this cost of living crisis.
Despite that, time and again, Unite and our members have to go into battle to get what’s owed paid to workers. The latest example of these kinds of battles—and of workers’ ability to win—is the victory at Cameron House, a resort in Loch Lomond dubbed ‘Scotland’s poshest hotel’. This week, it was announced that £138,000 in backdated tips would be put back into the pockets of over 200 workers employed there.
To accompany efforts by workers and their unions to get fair tips, we need legislation to make fair tipping practices compulsory. The government claims the private member’s bill tabled by Conservative MP Virginia Crosbie, currently before the House of Commons, will deliver fair tips for workers after seven years of the party promising and failing to do so—but in reality, it gives employers a massive way out via a year-long trail through the courts to get workers what they’re owed, which many low-paid hospitality workers will simply not have the time or energy to pursue.
That’s useless. In contrast, Labour’s tipping policy is a genuine effort to improve the situation for workers, closing loopholes and bringing consistency; deputy leader Angela Rayner understands that the mess and unfairness of tipping practices punishes workers and has vowed to change this in government, taking the time to work on proposals that will actually deliver for workers.
But for now, and no doubt in the future, this union will continue to organise workers to stand together to take on the bad guys and win. We will have to, regardless of what politicians do, because even when decent protections are in place, too many employers find ways around.
The 220 Cameron House workers involved in this victory found that acting together was the way to get the goods. Here, in their own words, are the Unite members of the Cameron House tips committee on why collective action delivers.
From at least the start of 2022 there was a lot of uncertainty regarding tips and their fair distribution between the workers. This was in the form of room charge tips, credit card tips, and service charge, which was ten percent of all purchases. We brought this uncertainty to the attention of management, but they proceeded to avoid giving any explanation as to where tips and service charges were actually going.
To illustrate the scale of this, in the month of August alone, the amount of service charge collected was £86,000. Given that some workers were receiving as little as £14 a month in tips, we knew that something was wrong.
So, after months of being ignored as individuals, we decided to take action collectively, joining Unite Hospitality and lodging a collective grievance with over sixty signatories. Within days we had a meeting with the resort director and director of HR. They promised fairness and transparency, but refused to agree to our most important demand: a tips committee to determine fair distribution of tips, elected by the workforce. That was the point at which we collectively decided to go public with the grievance—and gained nationwide media attention.
This made it clear to the higher-ups that we were serious. Once the senior management knew what we were capable of as a union, they started to pay us the respect that we deserved, and we started getting some answers.
After weeks of negotiations, senior management finally agreed to the election of a tips committee, voting for which went out to over 200 food and beverage workers across the resort. Unsurprisingly, they voted overwhelmingly for our proposed system, which will see all £138,000 of retained service charge and credit card tips fairly distributed to all workers who earned them from October, based on how many hours they worked. They also voted for future service charges to be distributed per unit, meaning another £70,000-£80,000 per month back in the pockets of the workers who earned it.
Three months ago, as individual complaints continued to be ignored, we could never have imagined that we would have won transparency on how tips are distributed, let alone have forced the company to facilitate the election of our tips committee and the sharing-out of backdated tips worth so much.
The key, it’s clear, was collectivism. That is the source of workers’ power, and through their union, it is how every worker in hospitality should demand they get what they deserve.