The El Charro chain of restaurants has been cited by the U.S. Department of Labor for withholding overtime pay and other violations. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
El Charro operates two restaurants in Harrisonburg, and one each in Bridgewater, King George, Orange, and Fredericksburg. The U.S. Department of Labor issued a press release on Wednesday saying that the operator had denied 55 workers a total of $196,000 in overtime back wages. That's an average of $3,500 per employee.
ROBERTO MELENDEZ: … salaried employees who were not exempt from overtime not being paid for all hours worked, or not being paid time and a half for the hours worked over 40.
Roberto Melendez is the district director for the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division in Richmond.
MELENDEZ: We did find some instances of other violations with minimum wage that we also looked into, and also violations in child labor that we also found – that in one of the locations.
A media representative for the department said they're not allowed to disclose how investigations get tipped off.
MELENDEZ: The way we conduct our investigations, we do look at payroll records, timesheets … in addition to that, we also conduct interviews of a representative amount of employees of the business in order to make that determination of whether the employer is complying with labor laws.
El Charro has to pay the back wages owed within 30 days, and pay a civil penalty of $4,000 for the child labor violations. WMRA reached out for an interview but did not hear back from the owners on Wednesday.
