Two Thai restaurants got $27,000 of free labor from workers, Department of Labor finds
The owner of two Orlando Thai restaurants got caught shorting hourly workers $27,000 on their pay after violating federal overtime requirements, the U.S. Department of Labor announced.
Through his companies that operate two of the three Chai Thai Cuisine restaurants in Orlando, Hong Saeunong will pony up that back pay to 17 employees, an average of $1,588.24 per worker.
According to Wage and Hour Division investigators, kitchen workers were paid a flat rate per shift, no matter how long that shift lasted. That, of course, led to overtime violations when the kitchen workers toiled for more than 40 hours in a week.
To get around paying overtime to tipped employees, the restaurants paid them overtime only when they went past 80 hours every two weeks instead of 40 hours in one week. And, investigators discovered, when the restaurants did pay the overtime rate of time and a half to tipped employees, instead of basing it on the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, they based it on the workers’ tips.
Another paper move to skirt paying overtime: counting the hours at each restaurant, 13747 South John Young Pkwy. and 2447 S. Orange Ave., separately instead of together when an employee worked at both during a workweek.
“Employees deserve to be paid the wages they have legally earned, and law abiding employers deserve not to find themselves at an economic disadvantage to competitors who break the law,” said Wage and Hour District Director Daniel White, in Jacksonville, Florida.
Employers can deal with overtime or minimum wage violations without litigation by self-reporting through the Payroll Audit Independent Determination (PAID) program.
This story was originally published November 19, 2019 at 10:20 AM.
