Taking advantage of employees rarely ends well, especially when one of them knows the law better than you do.
So, what would you do if your employer kept skimming your tips and paying you below minimum wage? Would you quit and move on? Or would you collect evidence and wait for the perfect moment to pounce?
In the following story, one college student found themselves in this very situation. Here’s how they handled it.
So this all happened years ago when I was still in college. I worked for a delivery joint.
The company seemed super cool because they provided vehicles instead of forcing you to beat down your own car. Huge perk, right? Well, in this case, no.
The owner of the company used this as justification to take a percentage of the driver’s tips. Often, this would result in an employee making below minimum wage. If you made below minimum wage, you would have to come and pick up your check in person and sign a document attesting that “you did make minimum wage, due to undocumented cash tips”. Or some such nonsense.
Knowing the Labor Laws, they decided to wait it out.
Now, this was a problem for two reasons. Number one, in the state I was in, employee tips belonged to the employee unless part of an employee tip pooling agreement. This was plain as day on the Department of Labor website. So that 20% gouge was already crossing a line. Number two, you cannot just hand wave and or force employees to say they made above minimum wage. So pretty shady stuff, right?
Now, most people see this situation and run for the hills (which probably explains the high delivery driver turnover). I, on the other hand, saw the potential. See, I am pretty well versed in labor law and decided that I was gonna ride it out. I wanted to see how long they would keep it up.
Here and there, I would make comments to the managers about the legality of their practices and was often told, “Our lawyers said it’s ok, so it’s ok” (I would love to meet these lawyers one day). So I patiently waited for a year, documenting every red cent they took from me and encouraging the other drivers to do so.
Eventually, the owners caught onto his plan and fired him.
Every new driver that came through that door got a little pow-wow with me, and I would give them the skinny. Unfortunately, my plan must have leaked because, sooner than later, the joint decided to fire me after making up three bogus infractions. This wasn’t a problem, though, as my plan was already in action.
See in this state, unpaid wages collect interest. So What was 20-40 dollars a night, 5 nights a week, over one year quickly became a decent sum.
So I began collecting the names of current and previous employees who had been screwed over by the company and collected their documented data, then sent it off to the Department of Labor. At the end of the day, it took a couple of months, but the company was eventually required to pay a decent chunk of change to all parties and a pretty hefty fine on top.
It cost them a fortune just to stay in business.
Overall, I believe it came out to a little under 100k. I wasn’t done, though. See, those shady little documents they had us sign claiming we made over minimum wage affected how the company was reporting its payroll tax. The IRS eventually came in and hit them for a ton of back taxes, and I received a small portion of the settlement (the IRS used to pay people who tipped them off; I don’t know if they still do).
Finally, I became increasingly aware of the companies under the table agreement with their health inspector, so I decided to go ahead and tip-off to the health department. This resulted in even more fines and a temporary closure for the joint.
It ended up costing this dumb little delivery joint a ton of money just to stay open, all because they wanted 20 percent of their drivers’ tips. The moral here is this: Know your labor laws.
Bravo! That was a smart way to get them back.
Let’s check out what the folks over at Reddit have to say about this story.
As this person points out, doing that someone is so wrong.
This would be amazing!
Now, this sounds very illegal.
Good point.
Too bad it didn’t run them out of business! Shady employers like this don’t deserve to have employees or customers for that matter.
If you liked that story, read this one about grandparents who set up a college fund for their grandkid because his parents won’t, but then his parents want to use the money to cover sibling’s medical expenses.
