The owner of a Peachtree City, Georgia, auto repair shop who paid a former employee’s final wages with 91,500 oil-soaked pennies has been ordered to pay nearly $40,000 more to nine of his workers.
Miles Walker, owner of A OK Walker Luxury Autoworks, was ordered to pay $39,934 by Judge Timothy Batten of the U.S. District Court for Northern District of Georgia.
The payment covers equal amounts of back pay and liquidated damages owed for overtime violations and for the retaliation against former A OK employee Andreas Flaten.
After Mr. Walker had failed to pay Mr. Flaten his final paycheck of $915, Mr. Flaten contacted the Department of Labor’s Wages and Hours Division. Mr. Walker then hauled a wheelbarrow of 91,500 oily pennies to Mr. Flaten’s residence, complete with an expletive-marked paystub.
Mr. Walker also wrote on the shop’s website by March 25, 2021, that “yes we accept pennies as payment! They are cash you nitwits!,” which was ruled to be retaliatory harassment of Mr. Flaten.
The message was later changed to remove “nitwits,” and to tell people that a 10% processing fee applied to payments made in pennies. The revised message was up as of March 26, but was ordered taken off the website by Judge Batten’s order.
Judge Batten also ordered Mr. Walker to remove all photos of Mr. Flaten and any other defamatory references to him from the website, and to conspicuously display the court order inside the Peachtree City shop in areas where notices for employees are normally put up.
In terms of overtime, Department of Labor investigators found that Mr. Walker was paying employees the straight hourly rate for all time worked, including those hours surpassing a 40-hour workweek.
“I’m happy that justice was served. I firmly believe in karma now. … But besides that I’m just happy that everyone else who had to work for this guy got some fair compensation,” Mr. Flaten told WANF-TV.
Mr. Flaten received $8,690.54 in damages and back pay for work done at the shop from Jan. 12 to Nov. 22, 2020. He was not the employee that received the most money, however — Richard Goldschrafe was reimbursed $14,640.64 for a period between April 21, 2019, and Dec. 6, 2020.
“The court has sent a clear message to employers such as Miles Walker who subject employees to unfair wage practices and outright intimidation and retaliation,” Tremelle Howard, the Labor Department’s regional solicitor for Atlanta, said in a statement.
Mr. Walker’s attorneys, meanwhile, say that the judgment does not reflect his true character as an employer or businessman.
“Mr. Walker is like many other small business owners in America — he wakes up every day doing everything he can to put food on the table. Unfortunately, emotionally charged decisions can come back and bite you in the rear end,” attorney Ryan Farmer, who represented Mr. Walker, told the Associated Press on Tuesday.
• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.
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