Tacolicious Wage and Hour Lawsuit Reaches $900K Settlement

A recent Tacolicious wage and hour lawsuit has reached a settlement of nearly a million dollars after employees sued over unpaid wages.

Tacolicious is a small restaurant chain located in the San Francisco Bay area of California. Two cooks from the chain filed their Tacolicious wage and hour lawsuit in 2015, alleging that the company shorted them both regular and overtime pay, didn’t provide proper breaks or compensation for them and issued inaccurate pay statements.

The Tacolicious wage and hour lawsuit alleged that their employer failed to pay break wages; the CEO of the chain blamed that allegation on so-called “loose record-keeping.”

However, this was not enough to save the chain from settling this Tacolicious wage and hour lawsuit. One California attorney, Cathy Arias, told the Society for Human Resource Management that the record keeping problem is one that plagues the restaurant industry, and is likely to get them into wage and hour litigation like this.

“They just don’t understand the importance of being able to document that they are complying with California wage and hour rules,” said Arias.

Another California attorney, Travis Gemoets, said that “there’s simply no excuse for not documenting on a daily basis the start and stop times of your employees’ work.” Failing to maintain proper records leaves companies open to wage and hour lawsuits like this one.

The Tacolicious wage and hour lawsuit recently reached a $900,000 settlement and is waiting for approval from the Superior Court of California in San Francisco. The settlement will go toward current and former Tacolicious employees who worked for the company between Aug. 14, 2010 and July 11, 2016.

California Wage and Hour Laws

There are several important wage and hour laws that California companies need to follow—and keep record of—to both take care of their employees and avoid any possible wage and hour lawsuits.

California wage and hour laws require that nonexempt employees be given at least a thirty-minute meal break within the first five hours of work. Nonexempt employees must also receive at least one ten-minute rest break for each four hours of work.

Other California wage and hour laws include underpayment or unpaid wages, paying wages with insufficient funds, failure to provide meal or rest breaks, failure to provide one day’s rest in seven, failure to pay wages timely upon termination, and unlawful deductions from wages.

Some workers may be unaware of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) rules put in place to protect them and their rights as workers. Others, however, may deliberately choose not to pursue litigation or complaints, afraid that their employers will retaliate against them if they speak up about FLSA violations in the workplace like unpaid overtime wages.

However, FLSA rules that protect workers’ rights also protect workers from any retaliation by their employers based on wage and hour complaints.

If you have worked for an employer that has failed to follow the Fair Labor Standards Act or the state labor laws of California, including unpaid overtime wages, you may be able to either join a wage and hour class action lawsuit or file a lawsuit individually.

Join a Free California Wage & Hour Class Action Lawsuit Investigation

If you were forced to work off the clock or without overtime pay within the past 3 years in California, you have rights – and you don’t have to take on the company alone.

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