Posted on June 14th, 2019
Below is a complete transcript of this video.
What’s up fellow entrepreneurs? It’s John Falgerholm again with Metal Law Group.
And today I wanted to do another industry-specific video. So with these types of videos, I go into the liability that I see in a specific industry versus talking about a specific type of liability or a specific type of problem. Okay.
So today I want to talk about restaurants because restaurants are probably about 50% of my business, if not more. And it’s simply because there’s just so many things that can go wrong in a restaurant.
You can have wage an hour problems. I did another video about the risk of sexual harassment in restaurants just because of the way the working staff interacts with each other.
So anyway, what made me think of restaurants is I had a client and he came to me because he wanted to terminate an employee.
And basically he found out that over the five to six years of that employee had been working there, he had been stealing money out of every shift using, I don’t know the exact setup, but using a fake POS number and then billing half his stuff on that and then keeping that money. So even with that, there’s still a risk of firing.
And of course, you have to fire a person that’s dishonest. So he was fired and the guy then turns around and files a wage an hour claim. So it’s not that that it was a legitimate wage an hour claim, it’s just the amount of money that my client had to spend to defend himself, just to show that he didn’t do anything wrong.
So, of course, you can sue your employee also for any damage that they create to you.
But you know if you don’t need to, it’s just a waste of time. How do you collect from a waiter?
Even if you get a huge judgment, it just doesn’t make sense most of the time. So the problem with restaurants is just the number of people that work there.
If it’s a good size restaurant, just the number of claims, types of claims that you can get. Most of what we see is sexual harassment of course, but also wage an hour.
And the wage an hour stuff comes out a lot out of service staff refusing to take breaks because they want to keep their tips. But of course then if you fire them, that’s what they’re going to sue you for, even if they chose not to take the breaks because that’s not California law.
California law requires you for lunch breaks to enforce that and with 10-minute breaks to at least offer it, but my recommendation is enforce everything because they’re always just going to say you didn’t let them do it. So I say enforce everything.
The other big one I see is split shifts. The split shift law requires you to pay them an extra hour if they’re on a split shift, for the hour that they’re not working. And so a lot of people don’t do that.
They close for a number of hours, then they have that same person come back. What’s going to happen is you’re going to be charged overtime for that, and you’re going to get, it’s potentially going to be an overtime problem or a minimum wage problem. So both things are not good.
Restaurants are just a hotbed for litigation. And I’m not talking about just employees, I’m talking about slip and fall. I mean it’s just a ton.
But with employees, that’s probably the big ones. Sexual harassment and the wage an hour things, over time, minimum wage, meal breaks, rest breaks.
All right everybody, until next time, good to see you again. Bye-bye.
