Dive Brief:
- In another in a string of recent cases going against a range of employers for violating U.S. wage and hour laws, a Wisconsin restaurant chain will have to cough up $700,000 in back wages and liquidated damages, according to the Department of Labor.
- Workers at El Azteca restaurants in Appleton, De Pere and Neenah — all Wisconsin locations — received paychecks with wages below the federal minimum wage, and often were not given overtime pay, federal investigators found.
- Under terms of a consent judgment entered in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, the restaurants, their owners and managers will have to pay 129 current and former employees across several Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) areas that were ignored.
Dive Insight:
The suit follows an investigation by the Labor Dept.'s Wage and Hour Division that found the companies and individual defendants failed to pay kitchen staff and servers at least the federal minimum wage and overtime for hours worked beyond 40 in a work week at the four Wisconsin eateries.
"We see far too many violations like these in the restaurant industry, where low-wage workers are particularly vulnerable," said U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez in a statement, adding that the consent judgment "should serve as a wake-up call" to restaurant owners and the industry that the Labor Dept. takes violations very seriously and will continue to use every tool at its disposal to ensure workers get the money they have earned.
With the focus on the new overtime law, employers would want to ensure they are paying hourly employees fairly, but in the last week, the Labor Dept. has fined several other employers — from a range of industries — for the same infractions, including companies in San Fernando, Corona and San Francisco, Calif., Scottsdale, Ariz., and Frankfort, Ill., among others.