private equity firm, Hony Capital, in 2014. One of the top issues was the 8% deduction from their tips. One disgruntled PizzaExpress employee, who wants to remain anonymous, said that the admin fee was costing her £3 a night. “I have worked at PizzaExpress for 15 years,” she said in a letter to Unite. “After all this time, I’m still only paid the national minimum wage of £6.50 an hour. So you see my colleagues and I are heavily reliant on customer tips to top up our low wages. I work hard and am good at my job but, when PizzaExpress thinks it can get away with taking a percentage of our hard-earned tips left on a card, I get upset.” PizzaExpress joins restaurant chains Ask and Zizzi in siphoning off 8% of the tips paid by card but other chains deduct even more. Café Rouge, Bella Italia and Belgo deduct 10%, as do Strada and Giraffe, which is owned by Tesco. A spokesperson for PizzaExpress said that its admin charge was to cover the cost of running a “tronc” – a standard pay arrangement used to distribute tips among staff. “We went to great lengths to set up this tronc system, which is chaired by a troncmaster and run by a committee of waiters and pizzaiolos who independently decide how tips made by electronic card payment are subsequently distributed between front- and back-of-house restaurant teams; a system run by employees for the employees,” she