A restaurant in the state of Massachusetts will have to pay 13 of its employees more than $340,000 dollars in back wages and damages. This is because the business did not give them the tips or pay them the overtime that they deserved between 2016 and 2019.
The US District Court found that the Sweet Lemons Thai restaurant in the city of Weymouth also failed to keep accurate records of workers’ wages, violating the Federal Labor Standards Act.
The Department of Labor, which filed the civil lawsuit in December 2020, said the restaurant deprived workers of their earned wages and tips with their effort.
The failure occurs in a moment where in the US there is a heated debate about a fair minimum wage for workers, particularly tipped staff, whose employers may pay them as little as $2.13 dollars per hour.
It is said that the restaurant withheld this money from them in retaliation because during the pandemic, the workers s left the industry due to low wages, lack of benefits, and poor or unsafe working conditions.
“The court’s decision recognizes that employers who retaliate against employees who assert their rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act may pay the price in punitive damages,” said Maia Fisher, regional labor attorney for the Department of Labor in Boston.
Sweet Lemons restaurant did not pay staff an overtime premium when they worked more than 40 hours in a week and kept all the tips the waiters earned.
He also accused the owner and director of the restaurant, Pornthip Neampong, of retaliating against the workers by forcing them to sign statements false, telling them to lie to a Department of Labor investigator and telling staff not to be in the restaurant when he investigates dor was there.
The lawsuit said that Sweet Lemons and Neampong knowingly violated labor laws.
The court ordered Sweet Lemons and Neampong to pay 000 workers affected $130,018 in back wages, $29,881 in tips they did not receive and $159,899 in damage. They were also ordered to pay $25,000 in punitive damages, totaling $344,798, as reported by Business Insider.
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