Kentucky restaurant made servers work for tips only, paying no wages, feds say
A Bowling Green hibachi restaurant that required tipped employees to work only for tips, paying them no wages, was ordered to pay more than $50,000 in back wages, the U.S. Department of Labor says.
The Wage and Hour Division said it recovered $52,805 for 33 employees of Hibachi Grill & Supreme Buffet after an investigation, according to a news release.
The law requires that employees who receive tips be paid at least $2.13 an hour by their employer. In cases like this one, where the company does not pay any hourly wages, the government does not give the employer any credit for the tips the employees received and requires the company to pay back the full federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour for every hour the employees worked without wages, according to the release.
In addition to not paying wages to servers, the restaurant did not pay overtime to other employees as required by law.
Instead, the labor department said the restaurant “paid kitchen helpers, dishwashers, cooks and other workers flat salaries, regardless of the number of hours that they worked,” which was sometimes not as much as they would have made if they had been paid minimum wage for their work.
“Failure to keep records of the number of hours employees worked also resulted in recordkeeping violations,” the labor department said.
“These essential workers deserve to take home every penny of their hard-earned wages and this case shows clearly how quickly back wages can accumulate when employers fail to follow federal wage laws,” Karen Garnett-Civils, director of the Wage and Hour Division’s Louisville district, said in the release. “When Hibachi Grill shorted its workers’ pay, their illegal actions gave them an unfair advantage over restaurant employers who play by the rules. The U.S. Department of Labor is committed to enforcing the law so that employees keep what they earn, and that employers compete on a level playing field.”
