Pizza Business Sued for Violations of Ohio Employment Laws

Springfield, OHViolations of Ohio employment law and Ohio labor laws are not always committed by large, national corporations. Sometimes, smaller businesses can - on purpose or accidentally - violate Ohio overtime and minimum wage laws. Regardless of whether the company that broke the law is large or small, employees are still owed money for the hours they worked, and if employers have not properly paid their employees, they may be on the hook for the unpaid wages.

To that end, a lawsuit was reportedly filed by the Ohio Department of Commerce and the Ohio Attorney General’s Office against a pizza business for failure to pay minimum wage. The Springfield News-Sun (12/29/13) reports that an investigation into the companies, A&R Pizzeria LLC and WiseGuys Pizza & More, revealed workers were owed more than $18,000 in unpaid wages. That $18,000 allegedly accumulated between April and June of 2013. The report also notes that employees are owed for overtime.

The owner of WiseGuys Pizza & More and A&R Pizzeria, however, says his companies had already split from the co-owner at the time of the investigation, so his companies are not involved in the failure to pay minimum wage, according to the Springfield News-Sun (12/31/13).

Large, national companies can also be accused in court of failure to pay overtime. In a lawsuit filed against Kaiser Foundation Hospitals in Cleveland, Jan Lynch alleges Kaiser used an illegal method of timekeeping to avoid paying overtime. Courthouse News Service (12/31/13) reports that Lynch alleges Kaiser’s Ohio IT positions were reclassified from overtime exempt to overtime non-exempt following a lawsuit regarding unpaid overtime in California.

Instead of being paid overtime, however, employees were allegedly discouraged from taking overtime and told to take equivalent time off. According to the lawsuit, employees were told to “adjust their time” when they worked more than 40 hours in a week. They were reportedly encouraged to log in to the system when they took this time off so that it would not be counted against the leave they were entitled to.

But Lynch says when she became pregnant she was singled out for using the system her managers told her to use, despite no one else facing the same scrutiny. Her use of the system, Lynch alleges, was management’s excuse for terminating her employment, even though, according to her, she was simply doing what management told her to do instead of being paid overtime.