A New Jersey restaurant had to pay $300,000 to staff after the Labor Department ruled they had been underpaid

• A New Jersey restaurant failed to give some staff the minimum wage and overtime pay, the DOL said.
• It paid workers a day rate of $25 to $50 regardless of the hours they worked, the DOL claimed.

A New Jersey restaurant had to pay more than $300,000 to 63 members of staff after the Department of Labor determined that in some cases they had been paid less than the minimum wage.

The DOL's Wage and Hour Division said in a press release that Aquarius Restaurant Group, which runs Aquarius Seafood Restaurant in Fort Lee, had violated minimum wage and overtime pay laws.

The restaurant paid workers a day rate regardless of how many hours they worked, which ranged from $25 to $50 a day, a DOL spokesperson told Insider.

This meant that in some cases the restaurant failed to pay correct overtime rates of one-and-a-half times the usual rate of pay for hours worked over 40 in a week, the DOL said.

Aquarius Seafood Restaurant also used checks and cash to pay kitchen staff twice a month, the spokesperson said. "The firm was able to provide some records of cash payments, but could not provide an accurate representation of the hours worked, resulting in the overtime violation," they said.

The spokesperson said that the DOL had also found that the restaurant had collectively underpaid 11 workers by $11,287.20 after failing to give them the minimum wage. They added that the minimum wage violations occurred "sporadically" throughout the period of investigation, which was from April 2019 to April 2022.

As well as recovering $150,805 in back wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages for affected staff, the division assessed $35,274 in civil money penalties because of the "willful" nature of the restaurant's violations.

"Most people employed in the restaurant industry work long hours to support themselves and their families and they have the right to be paid all of their earned wages," Paula Ruffin, the Wage and Hour Division's district director for Mountainside, New Jersey, said in a statement.