LA restaurant chain ordered to pay $1.6 million in back wages for 83 workers

The owner of a Thai restaurant chain in Los Angeles has been ordered to pay over seven figures in back wages and damages to 83 employees.

On Jan. 3, the U.S. Department of Labor announced the results of an investigation into a Los Angeles restaurant chain's payment practices, recovering a total of $1,651,550 in back wages from a single owner.

Investigators for the department’s Wage and Hour Division ordered that Prapai Boonyindee pay damages related to actions they say Boonyindee deliberately took to deny workers pay they were owed. Boonyindee is the owner of six Los Angeles-area Thai restaurants called Ocha Classic, and one called Vim in Panorama City. All seven restaurants are involved in the judgment.

TODAY.com reached out to Boonyindee, Ocha Classic and Vim for comment but hasn’t heard back as of this writing.

According to officials, Boonyindee intentionally denied overtime pay to 83 workers, keeping "false records" in an attempt to hide the wage theft. Boonyindee also allegedly falsified records to show that employees worked no overtime hours and intentionally withheld pay from workers for overtime hours they completed — both violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

“Wage theft is used by unscrupulous restaurant industry employers to increase their bottom lines at the expense of some of our nation’s lowest paid workers,” said Jessica Looman, principal deputy administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, in a press release. “We work tirelessly to recover hard-earned wages owed to workers like these, and employers who disregard workers’ rights accountable for their illegal pay practices and their attempt to mislead our investigators.”

Boonyindee was ordered to pay $825,775 in overtime back wages and an equal amount in damages, for a total of $1.6 million. The division also added a $62,167 civil money penalty because of the "the willful nature of Boonyindee’s violations," according to the agency. It often charges these additional penalties based on a specific set of criteria to deter offenses like them from happening in the future.

But this is just one of many offenses of this kind — where workers were owed tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages or tips — in the food services industry.

The Department of Labor says it recovered over $27 million in wages for more than 22,000 food service workers in fiscal year 2022 alone.

The federal agency recovered wages from smaller establishments, like North Carolina-area restaurant Jay’s Kitchen, owned by Mugen Inc., which was found in October 2022 to have kept staff tips, as well as from larger, more recognizable chains, like Krispy Kreme.

"At Mugen Inc. we value our employees, and they are part of our family. We are very sorry about the pay issues and sincerely apologize to our employees and former employees for it," Mugen Inc. said in a statement to USA Today at the time. "We have taken actions to make it right and make sure it cannot happen again. We also appreciate the effort made by the US DOL in their diligent investigation which helped us identify and correct the problems."

In November 2022, Krispy Kreme agreed to pay nearly $1.2 million in back wages and liquidated damages to 516 workers to resolve overtime violations in multiple locations across the country.

“We do not agree with the department’s findings and the basis for them,” Krispy Kreme said in a statement to USA Today at the time. “However, we have agreed to settle this matter with no admission of wrong-doing in the best interests of our business and our team members.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com