Two Long Island sisters who own a fast food restaurant are navigating a legal nightmare they never saw coming.
They were sued for millions of dollars over a law they didn't realize they were breaking.
Patty DeMint and Michelle Robey combined savings and loans to build a Dairy Queen franchise, which quickly became a Medford sweet spot, supporting community and offering jobs.
Robey said it was her sister's dream.
"We are the DQ Sisters, and they are part of our family," she said.
"Whether you are a felon, whether you are misplaced, whether you are 80 years old, whether you are 14 years old, everyone needs a place to call home as far as a job goes," DeMint said.
"It's kept me out of trouble," store manager Gabriel Talavera said. "It's more like a family than just a regular business."
So DeMint and Robey were blindsided by a blizzard of claims that they were breaking the law by paying employees every two weeks instead of weekly.
"It was ridiculous to us because we knew we paid every employee every dime that they were owed," Robey said.
They were violating New York's "Frequency of Pay" law, dating back to the Depression to prevent wage theft. The law requires "manual workers" be paid weekly, vaguely defining a manual worker as "a mechanic, workingman or laborer" who "spends more than 25% of working time engaged in" physical labor.
DeMint said she had been paid biweekly her whole career,...
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