SELBYVILLE, Del.--A federal court has ordered a local business in Sussex County to pay $300,000 in back wages and liquidated damages to at least 16 workers for treating them unfairly for a number of years.
APS Market & Grill LLC., which owns a popular Mexican restaurant known as 'La Sierra Taqueria,' a grocery store, a butcher and a barber business, reportedly violated labor laws, in some cases paying their workers less than the state's minimum wage. The business did not keep records of payroll or the workers' addresses or telephone numbers, according to the settlement document.
Maribel Rivera-Lopez an assistant district director with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division Philadelphia District Office, was one of the legal members who worked on this case, and she said many employers take advantage of workers who may have a language barrier or may not fully understand labor laws in the U.S.
"One of the things we see is sometimes you have a very highly-recognized restaurant and you have the kitchen workers that are mostly foreign workers that don't speak the language, and...they worked all these hours and they are being paid a flat salary, that is very common and it is throughout the nation unfortunately," she explained.
According to the settlement document, owner Diana Barrientos-Granados and manager, husband Oscar Jimenez, were both responsible for implementing policies that kept employees from being paid minimum wage and overtime. They paid servers, cooks, dishwashers and butchers a fixed salary that did not vary with hours worked--some even working up to 78 hours a week.
The owner said in all the years they've been in business since 2008, this is the first time a complaint of this sort has been brought up.
"We are not bad people, like how they are trying to make us seem, they make it seem almost as if we treated them like slaves but no, everyone is free to choose where to work and if they didn't like it, they were free to leave whenever they wanted," Barrientos-Granados told WRDE over the phone. "The thing that failed us was not keeping any records."
Barrientos-Granados said she would often pay her workers partly with a check and partly with cash.
Furthermore, federal law mandates that a labor law poster be placed within a visible place in the establishment in a language spoken by the workers. The owner told WRDE her business has a poster up but the majority of workers were family members, and due to the trust that was there, agreements on hours and dates were simply agreed upon verbally.
"We Latinas come from a culture that is collective and is oral culture," said Charito Calvachi-Mateyko, co-chair of the Delaware Hispanic Commission. "We make a lot of oral contracts and sometimes it works because you trust the person, sometimes it doesn't because it goes against your own detriment. And so that's why we need to understand, a Latinas that we live in a culture that is written culture, and in this culture, you have to put everything in paper."
The couple said they are cooperating with paying the fine and fully understand the importance of documentation moving forward.
