NEW YORK — TGI Friday’s is facing a wage and overtime pay collective action lawsuit in New York federal court. The employees who brought the lawsuit claim the restaurant chain violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) when dealing with its tipped employees. The violations resulted in employees allegedly being denied the minimum wage and overtime pay they were owed. The employees received conditional class certification recently, meaning the 42,000 employees working for TGI Friday’s may continue with their lawsuit as a group. The 42,000 class members represent affected employees, including bartenders, hosts, and servers, working for TGI Friday’s since April 2011.
The Certified Claim
Two lawsuits were filed in April 2014 related to these claims. One lawsuit was filed by employees in Massachusetts and the other by employees in New York and Fredericksburg, Virginia. Jamel Flood and three other tipped employees are the current lead representatives in the newly certified collective action.
The restaurant employees claim the restaurant chain and its parent company, Carlson Restaurants Inc., underpaid tipped employees for the work they performed on the side, including work performed before the restaurants opened and after they closed. The tipped employees allegedly also performed non-tipped work, like stocking, food preparation, and cleaning. Yet the tipped employees were not compensated properly for their non-tipped time.
When tipped employees perform non-tipped work, they are entitled to regular minimum wage, instead of the tipped minimum wage which is typically lower in recognition that the tips received will total or exceed regular minimum wage. Furthermore, the tipped employees claim they were forced to share their tips with non-tipped employees like host staff, which reduced their hourly income. Both state and federal wage laws prohibit tip sharing with non-tipped employees.
Conditional Certification
The tipped employees received conditional class certification after providing the court with evidence that the parent company maintained centralized control of the restaurants across the country. This centralized control most likely means that the 42,000 tipped employees were subject to the same policies and potential wage violations. For collective actions to move forward, the court must find that the plaintiffs have met their burden of proof.
The burden of proof for a collective action is a minimal burden of providing enough evidence for the court to believe that there could be centralized control or an overarching policy affecting all of the potential class members. Collective actions also need to have representative lead plaintiffs. TGI Friday’s was previously accused of attempting to “pick off” the plaintiffs in this collective action by offering to settle with 19 of the named plaintiffs. Currently 15 of those plaintiffs have accepted the settlement offers.
If you are a tipped employee and your employer has failed to provide proper wages or requires you to share you tips with non-tipped employee, contact our team of overtime pay lawyers today. Our knowledgeable legal team can be reached at (855) 754-2795 or through our Free Unpaid Overtime Case Review form. If we accept your case, we will represent you under our No Fee Promise. This means there are no legal fees or costs unless you receive a settlement.