A California taco restaurant hired a 'priest' to ask staff to confess to workplace 'sins' like arriving late, an ex-employee told the Department of Labor

• A restaurant got a person "identified as a priest" to ask staff to confess to workplace "sins," an ex-worker said.
• They told a court the "priest" asked if they had stolen from the Sacramento, CA restaurant or harmed their employer.

A restaurant in Sacramento, California got a "priest" to ask staff to confess to workplace "sins," like whether they had stolen from their employer, a former employee told the US Department of Labor.

The ex-employee at Taqueria Garibaldi testified as part of litigation by the Department of Labor that the restaurant offered employees a "person identified as a priest" to hear confessions during work hours.

The former worker said that during a shift in November 2021, one of the restaurant's owners and operators asked them if they wanted to confess to the person, who has not been named, to "help with mental health."

"I decided to talk to the priest, but as soon as the confession started, I found the conversation to be strange and unlike normal confessions, where I would tell a priest about the sins I wanted to confess," the ex-worker said in a written declaration.

"The priest told me that he would instead ask me questions to get the sins out of me."

"The priest mostly had work-related questions, which I thought was strange," the former worker wrote in the declaration.

These included whether they drank alcohol or had ever been pulled over for speeding, as well as whether they had stolen from the restaurant, been late to work, done anything to harm their employer, or had any bad intentions towards their employment, the ex-worker wrote. They said that after the priest talked to staff, he left the restaurant together with one of the owners.

It is unclear whether the person who was identified by managers as a priest was actually a priest.

The incident came to light during an investigation by the DOL's Wage and Hour Division, starting in 2021, which found that the three Taqueria Garibaldi restaurants operated by Che Garibaldi Inc. violated labor laws by failing to pay overtime wages to staff, and by paying managers and supervisors from the employee tip pool.

Workers claimed that during the investigation, the restaurants instructed staff not to work with the DOL and told them to share false information.

Workers told investigators that they had been threatened with retaliation and adverse immigration consequences if they cooperated with the DOL, and claimed that the restaurants had fired a worker management believed had submitted the DOL complaint.

Workers told investigators that they had also been instructed to lie to the DOL about how many hours they worked a week.

The restaurants' owners and operators said in legal filings that they didn't discourage employees from cooperating with the DOL's investigation, saying that they did not threaten to terminate employees or make immigration threats.

Che Garibaldi agreed to a consent judgment, signed by William B. Shubb, a judge for the US District Court for the Eastern District of California in early May.

Shubb ordered Che Garibaldi and its three owners and operators to pay $70,000 in back wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages to 35 employees, totalling $140,000, as well as $5,000 in civil money penalties due to the willful nature of the violations.

The court also ordered the restaurants to not interfere with DOL investigations or retaliate or threaten to retaliate against workers thought to have spoken to investigators.

Che Garibaldi's attorneys did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, made outside of regular working hours.