Restaurant forced to pay back wages

Owners of the Manila Good-Ha restaurant chain, with one location in

Glendale, turned over more than $180,000 to the Department of Labor

this week, reimbursing 82 of the business’s employees in unpaid

overtime, officials said.Of that $180,000, Salvador and Fe Wong,

owners of all five Manila Good-Ha restaurants, with four others in

Los Angeles, Panorama City and Union City, will pay about $36,000 in

back wages to 16 of its Glendale restaurant employees, Department of

Labor spokeswoman Deanne Amaden said.

“We had gone in and looked at what had happened with pay records

and found that all the workers were being paid at a flat salary,” she

said. “They were due quite a bit for hours worked over 40.”

Department of Labor officials would not say how they suspected the

Wongs of wage violations, but officials said it is not unusual for

the department to do routine surveys of establishments or to receive

complaints from employees.

“What we’ll do is we’ll check and see what kind of pay records are

being kept, and if there are none, we’ll interview employees,” Amaden

said. “The bottom line is we go in and we try to establish what kind

of work patterns there were, and that’s true of any establishment, a

restaurant, garment shop or car wash.”

Investigations by the Department of Labor found that non-exempt

employees at the restaurant’s five locations worked up to 50 hours a

week without overtime pay, a violation of the federal Fair Labor

Standards Act.

The Wongs also failed to keep accurate payroll records and paid

many of its employees in cash, Amaden said.

“Sometimes it’s real clear to me that people were intentionally

skirting the law, but nothing in the records are telling me one way

or the other on this one,” she said.

The $180,000 in back wages will compensate employees for hours

worked between June 2003 and June 2005, she said.

The Wongs will not be required to pay any additional fines for the

violations because this is the first time the Department of Labor has

encountered any problems, she said.