sharpplanar

That is an unfortunate position, and I doubt you are the only one to have experienced that. I was personally employed at a place that didn't pay overtime, that is why I was aware of the DOL as a tool. One of the other employees called to try to get an investigation going and shared it with us. The owners never knew.

I used to do accounting for a restaurant and I would disagree with you and say with the move to modern Point Of Sale software restaurants not doing this would be the exception now. We checked this every pay period to make sure servers were at or over the proper hourly wage because it is illegal to pay them less.

Florida based for reference, tips are self reported here too but our POS system would automatically transfer tip amounts when a credit card was the payment method. So our payroll system already has that amount. Then we had an electronic time clock where servers scanned their hand to clock in\out, and it was set to prompt them for declared cash tips. It was a nicer restaurant (avg check a bit over 100$). Occasionally a server wouldn't declare enough tips to hit minimum wage for a pay period and the first thing HR would do is check to make sure they were declaring cash tips. In 5 years working there I can't remember a single time a server was actually under minimum wage for a pay period, they just weren't declaring cash tips because CC tips usually covered it.

I have been out of hospitality for a few years but I am seeing even smaller places with POS systems run on Ipads. I would assume since we live in the future these have similar features to the ancient 'micros' brand POS system we used and could integrate with quickbooks or better accounting software to run payroll and do these calculations.

P.S. for any server (or employee anywhere for that matter) who thinks their company is doing something illegal you don't have to even talk to your manager/boss/owner, just call the Department of Labor they pay people to fix these problems for you.

Consider these are bureaucratic metrics used to show the effectiveness of policy changes. It is difficult and after a certain time perhaps even inaccurate to measure outcomes, it is really easy to measure college admissions by race and ethnicity.

I think for the government the goal is get students from low socio-economic background to college because it shows their policies at lower levels of education are working. You are thinking in the wrong slice of time. You are thinking birth to job, when really the focus for these metrics is on birth to college because for that group of people they will be the first in their family to ever go past high school, some might be the first in their family to even finish high school and as dragonwriter said that metric is a huge indicator of positive future outcomes.

You said you aren't from the US and I am not sure how familiar you are with our geography or culture but Education in the US is tough, the population is diverse and spread out over a huge area, I mean freaking huge. If you took the population(1) of students in the US K-12th grades it would be the 27th largest country in the world(2), ahead of Canada, Spain, and Switzerland. Think about that for a moment in terms of just the number of human beings being managed on a daily basis the US education system is more complicated than those three countries. This is part of why finding metrics that effectively measure quality is so hard and number and composition of students going to college is an easy one.

Another thing to consider which you pointed out in 3 and 4 is degree choice and jobs. First, degree choice, US universities offer degrees that don't directly connect to careers, if a student chooses a bad degree their outcome (job prospects, pay, lifetime earnings potential) will stink. So measuring the outcome gets very complicated at that level. Second, post graduate success, how do we measure success? If someone is happy making 25k a year living in a tiny beach community for the rest of their life are they less successful than someone who goes into finance and is making a 7 figure salary before they are 30?

In a perfect would everyone would get the best outcome for them, that makes them truly happy and makes their life and the world a better place. Measuring it wouldn't even matter because it would be happening for everyone. But, until we make it to a post scarcity society measuring the incremental change in a metric that is a good indicator we are moving in the right direction is the best option.

(1)http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 (2)http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-...