While I don’t want to make assumptions, given the names of every employee listed in the judgment, this is certainly very possible.

I was just about to say how delicious everything looked. Huh. Maybe I need to go eat a cookie and reassess.

I can’t tell what ANY of it is. If I somehow got stuck there for lunch I think I’d just have some juice.

Make sure there is follow up to this. There was a similar situation with a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco recently - restaurant did wage theft, DOL fined them and forced them to pay back wages. So the shithead owner paid the employees what he owed via check and then told them they had to pay HIM those wages BACK,…

At the risk of sounding like a Marxist, I argue that simply being poor is wage theft. When I was 21 and had two small children (one ours, one step), I worked in a down-scale restaurant 7 days a week, 14 hours a day for minimum wage plus tips (which is actually far more generous in terms of dollars than in some…

The most common response, hands down, is “We are like family here! They like getting paid this way!” I find this explanation to be totally plausible. Really. :\

So, the resturaunt owner gets caught stealing and the only penalty is to pay back what was stolen? No interest? No fines? No jail?

There was a buffet place in my hometown that was caught paying their employees $1.10 an hour last year. A lot of immigrants worked there, unsurprisingly, as the owners knew they could take advantage of their legal status. There were worse bits too. If an employee wanted a check stub so they could file taxes the buffet…

Thanks... and holy shit, those fuckers. That’s crossing the line to cartoon supervillainy.

My bet is the many, if not most, of the workers were undocumented, as that population of workers in that area put up with a TON of abuse in exchange for not having to complete things like I9 forms. Many times, ICE raids/investigations turn up all kinds of labor crimes, as illegal workers means no paper trails for…

Looks like Win lost, big-time.

Hrm. Not a good time of day for me, but my "*shrug* probably" math gives me an estimate of about $243 per person per week is what they stole. Fuck these people. They need to be in jail in addition to paying back wages and fines.

Some quick back of the envelope math.

This is an excellent question, and I’m in the process of getting an answer to it. I’ll update the post when I do.