A group of Wichita-area restaurants will be ordered to pay nearly a million dollars in back wages to workers after being accused of violating tipping rules and denying minimum or overtime wages for several years.
A federal jury in Kansas awarded $957,324 in back wages to 168 workers of Los Cocos Mexican Restaurant , at their three locations in Wichita, Derby and Andover, according to a news release from the U.S. Department of Labor.
A lawsuit filed in January 2022 accused the three joint owners of the restaurants of violating federal laws of using tips earned by servers to pay hosts and bussers and denying other workers overtime pay. Department of Labor investigators say the violations spanned from May 2017 to December 2022.
The nearly million-dollar figure is split into $567,291 in minimum wages for loss of tip credit, $276,115 in overtime pay for “back of house” employees such as cooks, $88,590 in withheld tips and $25,328 for other minimum wage violations, the release said.
“A jury of their peers found the owners of these three Los Cocos restaurants willfully took wages from servers to pay co-workers who bussed tables and greeted diners and did not pay workers overtime or paid some less than the required minimum wage for their hard work,” Regional Solicitor Christine Heri in Chicago said.