4 Florida restaurants with the same owner had to give over $250,000 of back pay to staff after the Department of Labor said they only paid servers tips

• Four Florida restaurants were ordered to pay $253,044 to 93 workers following an investigation.
• The DOL said the restaurants didn't pay wages to servers or pay other workers overtime.

Four Florida restaurants paid a collective $253,044 to workers after the US Department of Labor found that they didn't pay any wages to their servers and denied other staff overtime premiums.

The Mexican restaurants, which were owned by the same individual, and based on the East Coast of Florida, didn't pay servers "for any of the hours they worked, requiring them to rely only on customers' tips for income," the DOL said Wednesday.

93 workers were affected in total by this, the DOL said. According to court filings viewed by Insider, the restaurants were asked to pay back wages for a period of around three years and 10 months. Insider reached out to the DOL for further comment on the period covered by the fine.

Florida has a minimum wage of $11 an hour. Tipped workers, like servers, have to take home at least $7.98 an hour in pay from the restaurant, with the rest made up in tips. For an example, if a worker made $100 in tips for a five-hour shift, the restaurant would still have to pay them $7.98 an hour. If the worker made only $10 in tips for that shift, the restaurant would have to pay them $9 an hour to bring their hourly pay up to $11.

Companies also have to pay staff overtime premium of one-and-a-half times their usual hourly wage for hours worked over 40 per week. The four Florida restaurants paid staff straight time for all hours worked, the DOL said.

"Federal and state laws prohibit employers from forcing tipped workers to depend on customers' generosity to make a living," Wildalí De Jesús, the district director of the DOL's Wage and Hour Division in Orlando, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Low wages are one of the factors that drove thousands of workers out of the restaurant industry during the pandemic. As of May 2021 – the most recent date for which data is available for – Florida had nearly 820,000 people working in food preparation and serving-related roles, earning an average hourly wage of $13.68, data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows.