January 10, 2025
Waffles House Employees Accuse Owners Of Wage Theft Well In The Millions
How many more complaints until a change?
Servers from Waffle House locations across the country claim owners owe them $46.8 million per year after allegedly robbing them of earned wages, Fast Company reported.
In a federal wage theft complaint, servers are telling their stories of experiencing what they claim as stolen wages during shifts. Melissa “Kat” Steach, who serves at a Marietta, Georgia, location, says her shifts come at odd hours. Steach works as a tipped cashier and server but also pitches in for untipped work, including mopping floors, cleaning toilets, and scrubbing pots and pans, prior to clocking out at 7 a.m. The complaint, filed by the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), alleges franchise owners save between $15.6 and $46.8 million a year with tipped employees performing untipped tasks without compensation.
The Service Employees International Union affiliate labels the untipped work as constituted wage theft, since federal law allows employers to pay tipped workers less than regular minimum wage.
Steach provided a breakdown of her wages, with a pay stub showing 64 hours of tipped work ranging between $5.07 to $5.27 an hour, plus tips. She estimates in a five-day week, she spent close to 15 hours working without tips. In Cobb County, where the server lives, data shows the living wage for a single-person household is $26.55 an hour. With her living in a motel, she says she barely has enough to cover the $315 weekly rent. To survive off her check, Steach says, “I don’t eat.” “Corporations can’t keep throwing us around because we make all this money for them,” she said.
“And what are they really doing with it? They are not supporting their workers. They can’t keep screwing us around. We’re here. We’re worth it.”
Waffle House experienced the same robbery accusations in September 2024. Along with the Department of Labor (DOL), a complaint alleged the breakfast chain engages in “rampant wage theft, like performing non-tipped work for tipped wages” and violated the Fair Labor Standards Act’s tip credit requirement by not paying their servers the federal $7.25 minimum wage.
The complaint came just a few months after Waffle House CEO Joe Rogers III announced the company was increasing the base pay for close to 40,000 servers to $3 an hour from $2.92, according to CBS News. Since the food chain doesn’t staff dishwashers, kitchen helpers, or janitors, analysts say tipped workers are often exploited with wage theft. An analysis from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found workers who earn tipped wages are 2.3 times more likely to live in poverty than non-tipped workers. “Wage theft can happen to anyone. It’s any time a worker is not paid the money for the labor that they do,” Margaret Poydock, a senior policy analyst at EPI, said.
Steach is pushing for a change as she requested being formally trained as a cook for better pay, but has been denied by managers claiming they don’t have time. The option she was given was to work more double shifts — resulting in performing more untipped work for tipped wages.
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