Servers forced to give up tips to pay for dine-and-dashers in Florida, feds say
When customers dined and dashed at two restaurants on Florida’s Gulf Coast, the servers and bartenders dealt with the financial consequences, federal officials learned.
The employees were forced to give up extra earnings as Red Mesa Restaurant and Red Mesa Cantina in St. Petersburg withheld their tips to cover for customers who walked out on their bills, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
Some of the bills that customers skipped out on ranged from $10 to $175 in a single day, officials said.
Meanwhile, other employees were illegally made to pay for their work uniforms while others weren’t paid minimum wage or overtime pay, according to officials.
Now the two businesses, owned by Red Mesa Restaurant Group, have paid $190,730 in back wages and damages to 89 employees who weren’t properly paid, the Labor Department announced in a March 9 news release.
McClatchy News contacted Red Mesa Restaurant Group for comment and didn’t immediately hear back.
The agency’s Wage and Hour Division launched an investigation into both restaurants and found multiple Fair Labor Standards Act violations, the release said.
The employees were paid less than minimum wage when the restaurants took out the cost of their uniforms from their paychecks, according to officials.
Some employees worked at both restaurants, and there were instances when their hours weren’t combined so they didn’t receive overtime pay, officials said.
“In this case, the employer assigned employees to work at two locations they owned,” Wage and Hour District Director Nicolas Ratmiroff in Tampa said in a statement. “They should have added the hours worked at these locations together and paid overtime when the combined hours exceeded 40 hours in the same workweek.”
Additionally, employees stationed in the kitchens weren’t paid overtime while others were never included in the payroll records, according to the DOL.
The Red Mesa Restaurant Group owns other businesses, including Red Mesa Catering, Red Mesa Events, Quatro Americana and Red Mesa Mercado, but they weren’t involved in the DOL’s investigation.
This story was originally published March 9, 2023 at 3:42 PM with the headline "Servers forced to give up tips to pay for dine-and-dashers in Florida, feds say."
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