98 | Massachusetts Wage & Hour Peculiarities, 2025 ed. © 2025 Seyfarth Shaw LLP Seamen Agricultural workers563 While some of these exemptions have federal analogs, the requirements may differ under state and federal law, and Massachusetts employers must ensure that they meet both the state and federal exemptions before denying overtime wages to their employees. VI. TIPS AND SERVICE CHARGES The Massachusetts Tip Statute governs two key areas of employee tipping. It defines the charges that are considered tips, gratuities, or service charges, and it regulates which employees may receive them.564 The Massachusetts Tip Statute has increased in complexity over the years. When first enacted in 1952, the statute consisted of a single sentence that forbade employers from taking any share of tips earned by food and beverage service employees.565 The Massachusetts legislature modified the statute several times after its enactment—in 1966 imposing fines for violations of the law,566 in 1980 expanding the statute’s coverage beyond tips to include fees labeled as “service charges” (a term which the statute failed to define),567 and in 1983 directing businesses that impose service charges to pay them to employees who have provided service in proportion to the amount of service they provided.568 Up to that point, the law only governed tips or service charges distributed to workers within the food and beverage service industry. In 2004, the legislature substantially rewrote the Tip Statute.569 Most significantly, the amended statute includes definitions of the key terms “tip” and “service charge,” and it identifies three categories of employees—wait staff employees, service employees, and service bartenders—who may receive tips (to the extent an employer mandates tip-pooling or sharing) and service charges. Of particular note, the amendments extend protection to employees outside the food and beverage industry. 563 See M.G.L. ch. 151, § 1A . The agricultural exemption applies to laborers “engaged in agriculture and farming on a farm.” M.G.L. ch. 151, § 1A (19). M.G.L. ch. 151, § 2, in turn, defines “[a]gricultural and farm work” as “labor on a farm and the growing and harvesting of agricultural, floricultural and horticultural commodities,” “unless context clearly requires otherwise.” Based on this language, the SJC recently concluded that the agricultural exemption does not apply to post-harvesting activities, such as cleaning, sorting, or packaging of previously grown or harvested agricultural commodities. See Arias-Villano v. Chang & Sons Enter., Inc., 481 Mass. 625, 627-31 (2019). 564 M.G.L. ch. 149, § 152A. 565 M.G.L. ch. 149, § 152A; Moore v. Barnsider Mgmt. Corp., Civ. No. 04-1360, 2006 WL 2423328, *2 (Mass. Super. Aug. 15, 2006) (discussing history of the Massachusetts Tip Statute). 566 M.G.L. ch. 149, § 152A (1966). 567 M.G.L. ch. 149, § 152A (1980). 568 M.G.L. ch. 149, § 152A (1983). 569 M.G.L. ch. 149, § 152A.
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