Avoid Costly Restaurant Labor Violations, Lawsuits & Compliance Mistakes
What if one employee mistake could cost your restaurant $100,000…or more?
In this episode of the Restaurant Rockstars Podcast, Roger sits down with employment attorney and former chef Doug Plass to discuss the most common restaurant labor law mistakes that can lead to costly lawsuits, government investigations, wage claims, and compliance violations. From tip pooling and overtime rules to discrimination complaints, workplace investigations, wrongful termination risks, and child labor laws, Doug shares practical advice every restaurant owner, operator, and manager should know.
If you employ people in your restaurant, this episode could save you thousands of dollars, and help you avoid legal headaches that can damage both your business and your reputation.
In This Episode
Doug Plass brings a unique perspective to restaurant labor law. Before becoming an attorney specializing in employment law, he spent years working in hospitality as a chef, restaurant manager, and restaurant owner. That firsthand experience gives him a practical understanding of the challenges operators face every day.
Together, Roger and Doug discuss:
Restaurant employment law basics every owner should understand
Wage and hour violations that frequently trigger investigations
Common overtime mistakes that can create costly liabilities
Tip pooling and tip-sharing rules restaurant operators often misunderstand
How managers and owners can accidentally create illegal tip pool arrangements
Best practices for hiring and interviewing employees
How to handle employee complaints and workplace investigations
Wrongful termination risks and proper documentation procedures
Discrimination and disability accommodation requirements
Child labor laws and the expensive penalties associated with violations
Why employee handbooks and clear policies are critical for compliance
The Most Expensive Restaurant Labor Law Mistakes
According to Doug, two of the biggest legal risks facing restaurants are discrimination claims and wage-and-hour violations.
Many restaurant operators are focused on serving guests, managing labor, controlling food costs, and handling daily operations, but employment compliance often gets overlooked until a problem arises.
Unfortunately, labor law mistakes can become extremely expensive. Wage violations, overtime errors, improper tip pooling practices, and child labor infractions can result in back pay, penalties, fines, and legal claims that quickly add up.
Restaurant Tip Pooling & Overtime Compliance
One of the most important discussions in this episode centers around tip pooling and wage compliance.
Doug explains that restaurants taking a tip credit must be extremely careful about how tips are handled. Improper tip pool arrangements can result in lost tip credits, back wages, penalties, and significant financial exposure. He also explains why managers and owners should never participate in employee tip pools and how seemingly small mistakes can lead to large liabilities over time.
The conversation also covers overtime regulations, employee classifications, salary versus hourly compensation, and common misconceptions about exempt and non-exempt management positions. Many restaurant owners incorrectly assume that paying someone a salary automatically exempts them from overtime requirements. Doug explains why that assumption can be dangerous.
How to Protect Your Restaurant from Employee Lawsuits
When employee complaints arise, how you respond matters.
Doug outlines a practical process for handling workplace complaints, conducting investigations, documenting findings, and protecting your business from potential legal claims. He emphasizes the importance of having a clear employee handbook, established reporting procedures, proper documentation, and objective investigations when allegations involve harassment, discrimination, retaliation, or misconduct.
For restaurant owners, strong documentation and consistent policies can often be the difference between successfully defending a claim and facing costly litigation.
Child Labor Laws Restaurants Can’t Ignore
With many restaurants relying on younger employees, child labor compliance is another critical area covered in this episode.
Doug explains restrictions involving:
Employees under age 14
Work-hour limitations for 14- and 15-year-olds
School-day scheduling restrictions
Equipment and machinery minors are prohibited from operating
Cooking and fryer restrictions
Potential penalties associated with violations
The financial consequences can be severe. In some cases, a single employee’s violations can trigger penalties exceeding $100,000, especially when multiple infractions occur simultaneously.
Key Takeaway
Restaurant labor law is not something operators can afford to ignore.
Whether you’re hiring your first employee or managing a large team, understanding wage laws, overtime requirements, tip regulations, discrimination policies, complaint procedures, and child labor rules can help protect your people, your profits, and your business.
This episode provides practical guidance every restaurant owner can use immediately to reduce risk, improve compliance, and avoid costly mistakes.
Connect with Our Guest:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-plass-5a2959252/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/idahoemploymentlawyers/posts/?feedView=all
https://www.idemploymentlawyers.com/
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What if one simple employee mistake could cost your restaurant $100,000 or even more? Don't think this can't happen to your place? In this episode, former chef turned attorney Doug Plass reveals the biggest legal landmines restaurant operators face today. From discrimination claims and wage and hour violations to tip pooling, overtime rules, wrongful termination, and costly child labor mistakes.
Doug shares practical advice every owner, manager, and operator needs to know. If you wanna protect your people, your profits, and your business, this episode is packed with insights you can't afford to miss. Stay tuned
Welcome back to the Restaurant Rock Stars podcast. Doug, glad to have you on the show. How are you today?
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Roger.
Now you've got extensive hospitality experience. You were a chef, you are a restaurant manager, and now you specialize in employment law. And the
the meat of this episode is really on how to keep restaurants and operators out of trouble dealing with employees. So that's really powerful. But let's start with your, your backstory on being a chef. Why hospitality originally, and tell us about being a chef and what was really important to you then.
Yeah, so I, you know, like when I was a young person, , I, I tried to, to go the, the traditional route and go to college and do all that sort of stuff, and I didn't really enjoy it. I needed to work with my hands. I needed to do something that just kind of felt more tactile to me. I always loved cooking. So, you know, I kind of flitted around a bit and then eventually I, I did, you know, a culinary degree at a, at a little community college in Seattle, and jumped into kitchen. Worked for a few restaurants did catering for a little while. Eventually got the opportunity to open a restaurant for someone, you know, opened a brand new kitchen and in a historic restaurant.
And then I just kind of started doing my own thing. I took a, a little log cabin up in the mountains and turned it into a restaurant. And ran a, ran a very small business where I would change the menu every single day and kind of did what I wanted and had a really, a lot of fun doing it.
, Were you sort of focused on any systems that really made your operations work well? I mean, what were those systems? If you had to go back and do it all over again.
I feel like the, the most important thing to make a restaurant run well is to have the product that you need when you need it. That's number one. And then the second most important thing is to have the right people. You know, I was always concentrating on the food. The food was my main focus all the time.
I wanted good food and value for customer. So, you know, I, as the chef, I had control over what the food was and what I was serving. And I had, you know. , Inventory systems and, planning systems. A lot of lists, a lot of ordered lists. Here's what we need to do, here's when we need to do it.
Hopefully if there were other people involved other than me, they could pick it up. But it was also really important to have good, customer facing people that could kind of, I don't know, curate and control the experience for, for the customer. felt like that was really a, an important thing. There were times where so I, I ran, I had a restaurant up in a little mountain town here in Idaho and there were times during the off seasons and the shoulder seasons where were really, really slow and I actually at times ran the whole place myself.
And what was really interesting about that is you were able to kind of. Bring people in, and you get a couple of tables and it's really challenging, but you also say, okay, well, I'm gonna take care of you. I'm gonna take care of these guys over here. We're gonna get everybody drinks. I'm gonna disappear and I'm gonna go make your food, come back and poke your head into the kitchen if you need anything from me. And, and just kind of letting people know that you were taking care of them, created this great experience for folks and I, I really loved doing that.
You know that a real personal touch. I mean, the guy in the kitchen's also greeting us and being kind of the maître d’ and sort of the personality behind it, and then I'm ducking back in the kitchen. I mean, that does sound like a really fun experience and I have not had experiences like that before, but I would enjoy that if I came to that place.
And you were that personality and you're like kinda wearing all the hats and you're greeting people, but you're cooking the food and the quality was there. You really cared about, you know, hospitality. That would be a great experience. Thanks for sharing. Let's talk about employment law. You are now an employment law attorney and there are certain legal landmines that restaurants can get caught up in.
What would you say the biggest peril is? If you were to name one thing that you see restaurant owners making mistakes or they're really getting themselves potentially into trouble, what would that be?
Well, I mean there's, I guess I'd like to name two things. So, the first, the first thing is, you know, and this is true for not just restaurant owners, but for any business in general is kind of the risk of discrimination complaints. So under, title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Or under the Americans with Disability Acts or any state laws that you know, are kind of covering the same thing. You know, a lot of business owners don't really pause and think about what they're doing, and they just kind of are a little more reactive rather than a little more deliberative things and especially within that sphere. Are disability discrimination issues. So businesses have an obligation to work through issues with their employees with regard to disability accommodations and to go through this interactive process with them.
And if they short circuit that or if they make assumptions. And act on those assumptions, they can really get themselves in a lot of trouble., So really pausing, getting help when they can. Having good policies and procedures that everyone knows, how everyone knows how it's going to go is a lot of help there.
Lemme ask you a question on that note. Discrimination, of course. I know there are a lot of employers that really care to give people a helping hand to give them a job when they might have a, a hard challenge getting someone elsewhere based on discrimination. But let's just say. I'm an operator and I wanna hire the best person for the job.
I have one position open and I have a variety of applicants, and if I'm really looking for the best person, is it discriminating against someone else? If you really have no bias against them, they just in your mind, are just not the best candidate.
Let's, let's talk about that.
No, it, it isn't, but, but really what's important there is that you understand what actually makes a good candidate. So starting with a job description, that's a great place to start. You know, what are the functions of this position? What do I need the person in this position to be able to do for me? So then, if you're interviewing applicants, you're really focused on what you need from them. You know, we are always counseling folks to avoid asking questions about, you know, their personal lives during interviews, because then all of a sudden you're eliciting information that could potentially show. Discrimination, right? . What I care about is are you qualified for this position? Can you work in this position? Are you a good fit for this team? So, you know, if you keep that. Top of mind and document, right.
If you're, creating some sort of a score sheet for scoring your applicants and I'm like, you know, we're gonna give them an eight on this and a nine on this and a six on this metric and that, you know, create some sort of way so that you can evaluate the applicants on a neutral basis.
We'll really go a long way to avoiding that sort of issue.
Helpful to know for sure. Let's talk about wage and hour rules and tip pooling and record keeping. I mean, these are all, you know, perhaps separate topics, but they're also important and they're also challenges for operators. Thousand details in this business, as you know, and staying on top of the law is so important, but you got so many balls in the air, like what do you do?
Let's talk about wage and hours first.
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Yeah, so when I, when I said there were two main problems, wage and Hour is the second one,
Oh.
So, so I, I see, I see restaurants get in trouble on wage and hour all the time. So really what it comes down to is. Tips. Tips cause problems all over the place. So if, you know, we, we see restaurant owners that are taking a, a tip credit, right?
So paying less than a minimum wage and using tips to make up that difference. Well, there's specific rules that go along with taking the tip credit. And one, the one really important one is that you cannot have a mandatory tip pool. If you take the tip credit, if you, if you are requiring your employees to pool tips in some way and you're taking a tip credit that tip credit is out the window and you, you will be not only potentially having to pay back any of those tips that were pooled, but also face fines and pay back minimum wage violation as well. So, and that those numbers add up big time and there's civil money penalties associated with that. For the tip credit, I think it's on the $1,600 per violation, range. And then overtime is another one, right? So we see employers. Kind of failing to pay overtime for a number of different reasons.
Maybe you have two entities and shuffle between those entities. Well, if they have the same ownership, those hours would be shared between, and anything over 40 in a week would have to be paid. Over time there's issues with regular rates. So when you're calculating overtime, it's a. 50% premium on all hours worked over 40 in a work week based upon the employee's regular rate. Well, that regular rate may vary from week to week especially if they're doing different jobs at different rates. So you have to keep that in mind. So different states have different rules about over time
They're all going to be at least as beneficial to the employee as federal law.
So the Fair Labor Standards Act is the law that governs all this stuff. Nationwide and then individual states may have some other changes. Here in Idaho, we don't really have much of differences, but, you know, if you're in a state like California for instance, it's huge. you need to be really aware what, what the particular requirements are for your, for your state.
there's a difference between tip pooling and tip sharing, right? And the tip pooling thing goes out the window if you're claiming the tip credit. I understand that, but it's okay if, say a server tips out a service bartender, a portion of her tips.
What's really important is an accurate report of how much tips she's actually earning. And as we know, these tipped employees rarely, you know, claim a hundred percent of their tips. Is there a certain percentage to stay on the right side of the law about what they, what they're actually claiming, and how do we enforce that?
Well, so, so these days, you know, most of the tips come through credit cards, right? So that's stuff, there's a paper trail. And the employer has the ability to just report that on you know, on the employee, on the, you know, quarterly tax reporting. And that stuff should all get captured and there's not really an excuse for other than that. You know, I think the best practice is to, for employers to tell their employees, you know, that they're required to report their tips. And, if there's cash tips that the employer doesn't have any information about, well, it's kind of on the employee to do it. , I think when you start to get into the situation where you're saying, well, you have to report this amount you know, per shift. It, it doesn't always work that way. Right. So, you know, that seems like a way to just kind of avoid some liability, but it's not really based on the reality. I think having a policy sit that says, you know, we're reporting all the stuff that we have, and you have an obligation to report all the information that you have, that, that we as a restaurant do not, do not have.
But I do want to, I do wanna bring up one more thing about tip pooling. That I didn't mention before, and that has to do with managers or owners. if you have a, a tip pooling setup where a manager or an owner benefits from that, receive some tip pool from that setup, that's an illegal tip pool. you could face a situation where all the money that was paid in. That went to, that person would have to be paid back to that employee by the business owner, right? You're not gonna recover it from the individual. So you know when, you see
These Department of Labor investigations, from time to time the press release has come out and you'll see, you know, this business has to pay, $300,000 to these employees. And I think before I became a lawyer, I, I'd see something like that and I was like, wow, that's a lot of money. But now that I'm in it, I'm like, it's really easy to get there. It's really easy for these things to add up really quickly. Once you start having to pay back, you know, over a three year period plus the penalties, plus liquidated damages, which are, you know basically doubling the tip amount. and it's, it's significant.
You know, there are a lot of restaurants struggling, obviously with inflation and shrinking margins and owners are tied to their businesses and sometimes they're not making a decent you know, they're not making a decent salary 'cause they're just trying to make payroll and just trying to cover their costs and they're just trying to survive, especially since the pandemic.
And I do know that there are restaurant owners that also have bartending skills, and if there's a bar, they might jump behind the bar to make some extra money. Is there a way, I mean, obviously the honor system is at play here, but I, I can imagine lots of bar, you know, restaurant owners that are bartending just to make some extra cash, may not report those tips.
Is that at their peril? I mean, is there a real check and balance where they could get into trouble for that if no one else knows that they're doing that?
Well, that's the thing is no one else knows until they do. Right. So, you know, I mean the Department of Labor, well, I mean you're talking about reporting, so that's more the IRS, so, which isn't really my department, but you know. An IRS could audit your business, right? They could interview employees and say, what's actually going on here?
Right? So there aren't really any secrets that you can keep. You know, I, I think, you know, if the, if the owner earns tips they should report those tips. But it's, we're really based on, you know, if the owner or managers involved were really in the. of the old system where things aren't shared between.
I think that's, that's really what you have to have to keep in mind
I noticed once when I owned several restaurants, the biggest one of course had about 55 or 60 employees, and I used to take the schedules and I would the point of sale report and I would report the data to a payroll service that actually calculated the payroll and issued the checks and all of that.
One time I noticed that out of those 60 employees, I probably had 25 to 30 that were punching in early, anywhere from five minutes early to 13 or 15 minutes early, and I decided to watch, and the first thing people do is they go right to the point of sales system and they obviously clock in. The minute they walk in the door, and then I noticed people were hanging up their coats and ladies were probably putting makeup on in the bathroom, and then everyone was going to get a free soda behind the bar.
And then they're chitchatting with friends. And I realized that this was unproductive time and the schedule said You're supposed to be here at four o'clock. And I'm thinking, why are you punching in at, you know, five minutes to four or 10 minutes to four? So I created this system and I made it very clear, Doug, that we don't pay for unproductive time and that I'm going to edit your time off the point of sale system if there's not a legitimate reason why.
You were called in early and we had a signup sheet that said if you were called in for legitimate reason. Put your name, the reason why you came in early and get your manager to sign off. You know, this is something that restaurants run into all the time. They promote someone perhaps to be a manager, and then they, you know, the person was paid an hourly wage and now you're now. A manager and we give you a salary and you're expected to work in excess of 40 hours, but you might have made more money with overtime or with your regular wage.
Is that a contention? Is that a, a legal issue? It's like, what do you suggest there, if that makes sense.
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Yeah, I mean, I, so there's a, there's a number of reasons why you want to pay, you know, salaries, right. To, to folks. You know, you want, you want to, you wanna make sure that you have coverage, right? So you wanna make sure that things are done and that if they have to work in excess of 40 hours, they will.
And they're the person that you go to in that wanna avoid having to track their hours, right? And having to, to keep track of all that stuff and potentially avoid paying them overtime. what's important is you can pay someone a salary. just paying some of them as salary doesn't automatically make them exempt from overtime.
Really.
have to, you have to satisfy two things. you have to satisfy. So you're talking about the an exemption from overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act, this would be the executive exemption. This is for your managerial employees, right? And you have two things that you have to satisfy there. You have to satisfy the salary basis test, which means that they are paid. On a salary basis. So an amount that doesn't change from week to week $684 a week. That's what it is currently. There was some attempt to raise that recently that kind of fell apart, but at some point it'll change again.
Right now, that's what it is. And then you also have to satisfy the duties test. Now, when we think of a classical manager, they would all satisfy the duties test, but it, but it basically means they have to be. In charge of the enterprise or some recognized portion of the enterprise, they have to supervise the equivalent of at least two or more full-time employees. And they have to have the ability to either have the ability to hire and fire or their their, a perspective is given particular weight in hiring and firing and discipline decisions. Now, your classical manager, sure they're gonna fit into that, but some people who we call assistant managers won't.
And in fact, if you have a very, very involved owner, I would say some people that we even, that we call general managers, might not even fall into that. If the owner is calling all the shots on who's getting hired, who's getting fired, what's happening? You know, you might, you might be in trouble there. So you might not have an exempt employee, in which case you're paying a salary and, but you're still obligated to track hours and pay an overtime premium for anything worked over 40 in that situation.
So that's what businesses need to need to look at. You know, paying a salary doesn't get you over the hurdle. You need to look at what they actually do.
That's very helpful, Doug. Thanks for sharing that. Let's talk about complaints. Can you give us a basic complaint handling process or procedure that's both fair and good for morale? Is there a balance there
one of the first things I tell all employers is you need a handbook, right? So, you know, you need some sort of a document that lays out to the employee how things are gonna go. But the other benefit of is it'll lays out to you how things are gonna go, right? So if you have a complaint reporting investigation procedure in your handbook you know, that's legally compliant, that's gonna be. Really important here. So you gotta have sound policies that are implemented. The first thing to do when you get a complaint come in is make sure you understand what it's right. So this might involve like talking to the person who, who put the complaint in and saying, you know, exactly what, what are you complaining about?
What is the issue here? and then you're gonna wanna determine who is going to investigate this. In most restaurants don't have HR departments. Some do, I would imagine. I never worked in one that did.
Independent operators. Not everyone has an HR person. It could be the owner, it could be a general manager. It could be solid record keeping. It could be sloppy record keeping or anywhere in between.
Yeah. So, you know, HR or somebody or your manager. Those tend to be the people that would, would perform the investigation. However, if the complaint involves one of those folks. You know that they are accused of doing something wrong, that, well, there's a conflict there, and you're, and you may have a situation where you need to bring in an outside investigator, to investigate someone.
I, I think about this particularly in terms of sexual harassment complaints. That's, that's a big problem if you're, you're accused, harasser is, is involved in the investigation in any way. So you need to pause and, and figure that out. You also, you know, once you get an investigator, they're gonna wanna identify who the witness is and make a plan for how they're gonna go about doing this. And you want, you want a plan that's going to be, you know, to get the investigator what they want and minimize the disruption that is sure to result in your workplace. There may be situations where you want to put the accused. Or the complainant or in certain situations, both, though that's extremely rare on some sort of paid leave. Now business owners bristle at this all
Oh yeah. Oh.
I'm gonna, this guy's accused of something and I'm gonna put him on leave and pay him for it. But, if you want to protect yourself, you know what you wanna avoid doing is. Having an adverse action something that affects the terms and conditions of their employment before you have all the facts. So paid leave might be a way to accomplish this. I also like to use, if you're investigating, I like to use admonishment form some sort of form that you give to your witnesses that lets them know that asks them to keep. The conversation with the investigator Confidential, minimizes the disruption to your workplace where people aren't chattering about, you know, oh, what did you tell him?
What did you, here's what I told them, but also, it protects the integrity of the investigation. and then, and then having no retaliation policies saying people can't be retaliated against for taking part in the investigation and having and telling that to the, your witnesses and having them acknowledge that they know that they won't be retaliated against, that just makes people more open to share what they know. You're gonna want to present the information to employees that's only necessary to get their perspective, right? So, if person A makes a complaint against person B and you're interviewing, interviewing person, cd and e, you're not necessarily gonna tell those people exactly what has been complained. You're gonna, you're gonna wanna hold your cards close to your chest a little bit and just, and only tell the information that is necessary to get at what they know. And once you've gone through all that process, you're going to want to take an extra step to, to do some credibility determinations. Right? You know, usually when you talk to a bunch of people, you're like, well, okay, they're lying to me. They're not lying to me. You know, here's what I know. Here's who I believe Write that down. here's why I found this witness more credible than that witness. You know, here's the things they did and said that were, were consistent with what other people did. Here's the ones that are different. Here's, here's what their biases might be. You know, I know that these people are friends.
go through that process to try to really. Really dig down and figure out what, who's credible, who's not. And you know, you're not just relying on your gut as to what the facts are. You actually have some good documentation of that.
You get a written statement with a signature attached to it and a date, Are they willing to sign in if you interview them and find out the deal?
You know, there, there are definitely times, I mean, I think you're, you're gonna, there, there will be documents, especially in this day and age. I mean, things like text messages are pretty huge. You know, asking people to retain those and give those to the investigator, definitely signed witness statements is not, not always necessary, you know, but if you have a good investigator that's taking good notes. You know, I, when I'm doing investigations, I do workplace investigations from time to time. I don't typ typically record the interviews. Some people that's a personal preference. Some people prefer to do so. But I always take really good detailed notes. And, you know, and then the other thing is when you're done, you know, you, your investigator has done something and prepared some sort of report. Think about what's gonna happen with that report, right? So if you have a, if you engage outside counsel to run your investigation, you might be trying to keep that report privileged so it doesn't get shared with anyone. Well, the second you go ahead and share it with, you know, somebody else in your organization or, or refer to it in the discipline document kind of out the window. So you might wanna. You might wanna like, prepare an executive summary, just like a, a paragraph that summarizes the conclusions and then that's the thing that would get shared. Because it's, you know, a lot of times there's investigators can kind of go off and find a lot of other information that really you don't want to get out. you know, I mean this is a big subject. We do, we do half day trainings on how to run investigations all the time. So there's a lot there.
The whole point is to try to avoid a wrongful termination suit. If you let someone go for harassment, and if you feel you got the documentation, you went through all the necessary steps, you hired a professional outside investigator who's unbiased, you should be okay if all that evidence is presented versus that one person who said, I didn't do this right.
Yeah. And, and you know, some investigations are really simple too, right? You know, something happened, an event happened, and you know, we, four people witnessed it. Talk to everybody, write a one page report, you're done. Right. But what you don't wanna do is kind of make assumptions. Well, you know, like this person reported it and I, I, they're a good employee.
I've had them around for a while, and they're reporting somebody who's only been here for a couple weeks, so I'm just gonna let him go. That's, that's the problem. You know, if you're, you're trying to make a decision that affects somebody's employment. Make sure you have the facts to do it.
some employers obviously being short staffed, there's still labor shortage out there. People are still trying to find warm bodies in some cases. And some of these people are underage. They're age 14, 15, and there's certain amounts of hours they're allowed to work when they're in school, and then they can work more when they're outta school.
But that's a pretty big topic unto itself. Tell us everything you've got on, on child labor and what to avoid there.
Okay, I'll give you the, the, the quick dump. So basically the way it works is anyone under 14 years of age, you can't really employ them in a restaurant setting. There's very few limited occupations that you can employ. Somebody like that. Things like casual babysitting, you know, delivering newspapers.
Not that anybody gets newspapers anymore, but acting, things like that. But for 14, 15 year olds. You can employ them, but they, they do have pretty strong restrictions about how, so no more than three hours. In a day where there is school on a school day, so that includes Fridays,
Hmm.
So it's still a school day.
It's not a night before school. It's a day in which there is schools. And on a school day, no working. Past 7:00 PM I've seen restaurants get in trouble with that one a lot. And, and that's a minute past 7:00 PM
Okay.
and so that's, that's big. And then if it's a non-school days. Non-school day, they can only work eight hours.
They can't work more than an eight hour shift. You know, if it's on a Saturday or a Sunday or in the in the summer months, they can't do that. in the summer months, they can work until 9:00 PM so they can work a little later. But they cannot, they cannot do that. And then so those are, those are. kind of hours and times of work issues. And then other issues having to do with what they can do. Anyone under 18 years of age, so this would be your 14 to 17 year olds, cannot perform any of the listed hazardous occupations you know, within the regulation. So these are for restaurants, the thing that we want to think about is power driven. Meat processing machines and bakery machines. So your, your, your floor mixer, that sort of thing. There is, there are certain certain other things that they can do, like little standup, you know little countertop mixers Those are, those are generally okay for your, for your 16 and 17 year olds. You know, your, your big Hobart stand mixer on the floor mixer or your meat slicers or anything like that total? No. No. And that Inc even includes cleaning that equipment as well. And then for your 14 and 15 year olds they can only perform very limited cooking duty. They can't work with any open flames and they can't use a fryer unless it has an automatic raiser lower and raiser of the basket. So they cannot, you know, put the basket into the fryer, your 14 and 15 year olds. And yeah, so that's kind of the, the big overview and the thing that's really important about this. Is that penalties for child labor violations are on the order about $16,000 per violation. So that's not per child.
Yeah.
I've, I've seen situations where one kid, one 15-year-old was working past 7:00 PM working more than three hours on a school day, operating a cardboard compactor. a couple of different pieces of butchering equipment, like cleaning up the butchering equipment. It was over a hundred thousand dollars in penalties for that one kid.
Wow. Yikes.
Even one of those penalties What a setback for certain operators. For sure.
And then if there's an injury, those penalties go through the roof. I don't even remember, I think it's in the like $70,000 or something. If there's an, if there's an injury to a child. So not, not anything to joke about at all. Like take it. Take it very, very seriously. And you know, this is something back when I was running restaurants, you know. I mean, I'm sure I had my 14-year-old kid, doing things that he shouldn't have been doing. You know, luckily that's long time ago, not gonna get in trouble for that now. But, you know, I don't think that's uncommon. You know, you got somebody helping out. they're a good worker, they're eager to help and they just wanna step in and do things, know. I am pretty wary about advising anybody to hire, hire kids for that sort of work.
Doug, you've been a wealth of information. You've given us lots of nuggets of hard won information from a legal standpoint, how to stay outta trouble, how to stay on the straight and narrow. So I really appreciate you being on the show today.
Thanks so much, Roger. Thanks for having me.
That was the Restaurant Rockstar Podcast. Thanks so much to our audience for tuning in. Thank you to our sponsors this week. Can't wait to see y'all in the next episode, so stay tuned and stay well and I will see you then.
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