A group of national deputies of the UCR led by Julio Cobos presented a bill that aims to facilitate the payment of tips, especially in the gastronomic sector, through electronic means, whether debit and credit cards or virtual wallets.
In recent years, the circulation and availability of physical money decreased drastically while the use of debit and credit cards became widespread, first, and then even more so with the appearance of widely accepted and used digital wallets such as Payment Market and Mode.
The rampant inflation that plummeted the value of larger denomination bills also contributed to people turning to by adopting new electronic payment habits, thus avoiding the accumulation of wads of money in their pockets.
But this led to an increasingly obvious problem: paying the bill electronically at the tables of bars, restaurants, cafes or nightclubs, There is no cash to compensate the waiters for their efforts..
To answer this question, Cobos devised an initiative so that “the worker can receive the tip through a credit card, debit card, virtual wallets or any other means of physical or electronic payment.”
“For this, the BCRA must dictate the necessary regulations for the purposes of the immediate implementation of the system so that the client can include the tip in the transaction by the same means of payment by which the payment for the service provided or the product sold to which it is linked,” explained the man from Mendoza.
“In addition, we establish that the employer has the obligation to apply the available technology so that customers can include tips in the transaction using the same payment method by which the payment for the service or product to which the tip is linked is made and Under no circumstances will the employer be able to use the amounts received as tips,” he added.
The former vice president clarified that “this does not in any way make it impossible for the tip, if this happens, to be paid in cash.”
In the foundations of the project, the radical legislator noted that “the evolution of the digital world has caused changes in the way of consumption and payments” and “the emergence of digital wallets has meant that these mechanisms are used more and less of physical money”.
“In this context, Argentina does not have legislation to date that regulates the means of payment so that clients can pay and workers can receive tips. This is not a minor detail because the tip, in certain service sectors, makes up a important percentage of workers’ income,” he explained.
“In some areas of economic activity, especially gastronomy, tipping is a common use; the same with the already widespread delivery services. This growth in cashless payment methods such as credit cards, debit cards, virtual wallets and other electronic means; many times it implies a problem or an impediment for the worker to receive their tip,” continued Cobos.
In this sense, the UCR deputy warned that “there is no clear system that allows the client to include the tip in the same payment method used to cancel the service received or the product purchased.”
“With this proposal we want to fill that legal gap,” he expressed, and concluded: “We understand that tips are of fundamental importance for thousands of workers and with this project we facilitate their perception.”
The deputies Marcela Antola, Mario Barletta, Atilio Benedetti, Gabriela Brouwer de Koning, Fernando Carbajal, Pablo Cervi, Mariela Coletta, Pedro Galimberti, Melina Giorgi, Natalia Sarapura and Martín Tetaz accompany the project with their signature.
Source: Ambito
