Owner of L.A. Restaurant Chain Must Pay $1.65 Million in Withheld Wages

Dept. of Labor says workers at Ocha Classic and Vim locations were robbed of overtime pay and that the owner tried to hide his wage theft

By Laurenz Busch -January 9, 2023

The owner of the popular Los Angeles Thai restaurant chain Ocha Classic will have to pay $1.65 million to 83 employees that have been denied overtime wages in the last four years. Prapai Boonyindee also “kept false pay records in an attempt to hide the wage theft,” the U.S. Department of Labor said in a press release. ... The eateries in question include six Ocha Classic locations around L.A. and one Vim Restaurant in Panorama City. The $1.65 million tab accounts for back wages and damages in roughly equal measure, according to Labor, with another $62,167 to be paid “in civil money penalties for the willful nature of Boonyindee’s violations,” the release states. ... The payments will be sent to employees in increments, with several having already been sent out, Eduardo Huerta, the Assistant District Director of the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division in Los Angeles told LAMag.

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Some employees may have no idea that wages were withheld and some of them, Huerta explained, may only speak Thai, making it more difficult for them to understand the DOL forms even if the workers do receive them. Fortunately, DOL has a hotline where former employees can reach representatives in over 200 languages to check eligibility and find out what, if anything, they are owed at 213-894-6375.

The Ocha case is far from an isolated event, with wage theft plaguing some of California’s most vulnerable workers. From 2017 to 2020, California recovered $221 million in wages, according to CalMatters. ... California cited two janitorial service providers contracts by the Cheesecake Factory for $4.57 million in stolen earnings after 559 janitorial workers were underpaid (the chain was also cited); $8.5 million was recovered from six residential care facilities; $12 million was recovered from a subcontractor in Southern California affecting 1000 employees. ... Krispy Kreme agreed to pay $1.2 million last November, USA Today reported.

In 2022, the DOL received nearly 4,000 wage theft complaints from food service employees amounting to upwards of $27 million in stolen labor. Over the past decade, employers are believed to have stolen $34-40 million from employees across the nation annually.

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