It started with an audit, and it ended with a statement from the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) saying that Hard Eight BBQ, a local chain with five locations around Dallas and Fort Worth, performed illegal pay practices, according to a report from the Dallas Morning News.
The report found that the barbecue chain shorted 910 workers out of $867,572 in tips and overtime pay. The problem? Tipped employees were shorted by the restaurant, which included managers, who are hourly workers, in the shared tip pool, according to DOL. Juan Rodriguez of the DOL told the Dallas Morning News that the illegal tip share happened at all locations from June 2019 to April 2021. The audit was conducted in August 2021, CBS DFW reports. The business violated the Fair Labor Standards Act, which bars employers or supervisors from taking tips from workers for any reason.
Hard Eight posted in an Instagram comment that it paid back the nearly $900K owed to employees immediately, saying in a statement that the issue was resolved back in August 2021. While the DOL has recovered all the funds from Hard Eight and the restaurant is currently in compliance per WFAA, Rodriguez told the DMN that only 219 workers had been found and compensated.
In that same Instagram comment, Hard Eight pushed back on the idea that managers weren’t paid overtime properly, calling recently published articles about it “misleading.”
“We paid all overtime, there was no issue there, our issue with the labor board was that we did...
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