The arrival of marquee entertainment and sporting events means hundreds and thousands of temporary work opportunities. Between six FIFA World Cup matches, three days of MLB All Star Game activations, the summer-long America 250 celebrations, and seven days of PGA Golf at Aronimink Golf Club – hundreds of extra workers are needed to bring these events to life.
The FIFA World Cup just wrapped up at the time this article prints, America 250 ramps up leading into July 4th, and the All Star Break is in mid-July. Only one of these marquee events have come and gone, the PGA Championships at Aronimink and some temporary workers are upset with how they were compensated.
Liz Murphy, who normally works in the medical field picks up bartending gigs from time to time thanks to her background in the service industry. She decided to work the PGA Championship because “I thought it would be exciting and fun. Also that it would be a nice way of meeting other golfers and to make some extra money using my bartending experience.”
Liz and another worker who asked not to be identified, but we’ll call Zeke – both detailed working long hours in the heat, typically from 11am to 7pm at high volume bars. “The volume was extremely high. We were very busy. Everything was done by credit card. There was no cash transactions when they purchased their alcohol. The member’s food was all free, it was a buffet. There were no servers. We had no bar backs, we had nothing…” Liz continues “All alcohol that was paid for, had to be paid for via credit card. And these machines, I don’t know if they are PGA or Aronimink but every transaction, they had the opportunity for someone to leave, a 15% tip, 20% tip, or other and a lot of these people left tips because of the service that we provided.”
Therein lies the problem, Liz after working 47.25 hours took home $376.44 in tips after working six days at the PGA Championship. “In the first two days I made $400 on cash tips alone, and that’s all I got from the whole week,” expressed Zeke. Both Liz and Zeke were handed $100 bills as tips, which they handed in at the end of the shift. “They would come and take the end of day cash tips. Take them, not count them, put them in their pocket and leave,” said Liz.
In the initial contract that Liz signed, she was aware that temp workers would be paid $20 an hour for 40 hours and then make $30 an hour for every hour over 40 – but there was no mention of tips.
In an email to the Philly Plain Dealer, an Aronimink spokesperson told us – “tips were split among bartenders, servers, service support, culinary, and back of house workers because the PGA Championship was a team event, and all those workers contributed to the event’s success.” However, this spokesperson refused to answer questions regarding how many people split the tips or how much the total tip purse was.
Zeke’s theory for why bartenders came up with the short end of the stick is that tips were “split with servers and culinary people – and they had so many more hours. They’d add up the tips and then divide hourly to decide how much (of the) tips you got. They had so many more hours than the bartenders who were the primary source of the tips. Culinary people didn’t make tips, we did. They mostly worked overnight preparing food.”
Both Liz and Zeke’s frustrations come from a lack of transparency, they both say that they didn’t know tips would be split with all of the supporting staff. “We weren’t told how much was in the tip cup. We weren’t told how the end of the day tips were, nothing was printed out. You know what I mean? The tips on the machine. We knew nothing about that,” she says.
Ultimately after tips – Liz took home $29.50 an hour for 47.25 hours of work at one of the ritziest golf clubs in the area for the most important event it has ever hosted for the sport most associated with wealth in America. The PGA Championship purse was $20,500,000.
“If they would have been transparent, they wouldn’t have had the good bartenders that they did. No experienced bartender would have worked to split all their tips that way,” said Murphy.
There appears to be no remedy to this situation for Liz and Zeke, Aronimink is standing firm behind their tipping policy. If you’re considering taking on temp work, ask questions about your compensation because every event has its quirks and policies.
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