I'm all for a no tipping, living wage being paid to all the staff. I feel BOH deserves to make more money than FOH because they tend to work much harder and need more skill. Often times, this is not the case. Wages are all over the map all across the country for FOH positions but typically are the same all across the country for BOH. In a place like california, where the minimum wage for everybody, including servers, is $8 an hour. You have servers making their $8, plus whatever they pocket. Cooks in california, in alot of restaurants probably start at $8/hour and probably get no tips in in most cases. How is this remotely fair when you have two guys with no experience getting different jobs in a restaurant and the lucky guy who gets the FOH job ends up taking home 2,3,4 times as much? These servers in busy california restaurants probably make more than the chefs. Then you have a place like my state, Utah, where servers minimum wage is $2.13 an hour. $7.25 for BOH. In a slow restaurant, an experienced veteran server can be working for $7.25 an hour after mandatory tip credits, or what, maybe $9 an hour after figuring in their dismal tips for the day, which happens to be the same wage the chef is paying his new, inexperienced line cook. Maybe in this same restaurant, the chef (who obviously doesn't work very hard in a slow restaurant) is making $40,000 a year, for example.
One place I worked here, at a ski resort, everybody all pretty much made the same wage. The FOH started at $8/hour and cooks started at 8/hour. I was the sous chef and I was making $10.50, I believe. The bartenders here started at $7.25 an hour. The way it was set up, the FOH would get tips and we would pool it and split it up evenly among FOH and BOH (my policy). One time, I had a big problem with one FOH that refused to give up her tips. She was probably making $20-30 an hour these few days this went on. My manager would not support me at first when I brought this to his attention. I was irate and almost quit because of his lack of support. Finally, he gave in and made her give them up. I always suspected she was pocketing about half of it after that. (Karma got her very quickly. She fell through a pocket in the snow and broke her ankle. LOL)...
Also, our bartenders would participate in the pool. They made their $7.25/hour but they made more money then everybody else there with their tips. On busy days, which we would have quite often, they would take home $400-600 a night. They would cut me about 10-20% of their take for me to split up with the BOH because they did not have a bar back. Whenever they would get a food order, I would personally deliver the food to the guest in the bar in my chef's whites because the bartender's hands were usually full and they had no help. We ended up hiring a new bartender and I explained to her the (unofficial) policy about giving BOH a cut, since we were really helping them out when they got a food order. She refused to give me any money. I decided to show her exactly why she should stop being so greedy. Whenever she was working and I got a food order from her, I would cook the food, then I'd set it in the pass, only to let it die. 15-20 minutes would go by and of course when she was busy, I was usually very busy too. So, it's not like I was just letting her food die and I was just staring at it with nothing to do. I would let it sit. She would come rushing back, wondering what happened to her order. I would point to it and then she would have to take it shamefully to the guest. She never once asked me to re-fire it. I probably would have if she just asked. I did this a few times and then I started to take orders out to the guests for her just to show her what I normally do for the other bartenders. After that, she started tipping out the BOH like a good girl. We were still making much less money than her. If she had $600, she would give me $60 to split between 4-5 of us.