Meet the real pizza rats of New York City.
Hundreds of sauce-slinging slice shops across the five boroughs have been jilting their employees out of thousands of dollars in hard-earned dough by underpaying them, refusing to dish out overtime and violating other Fair Labor Standards Act requirements, according to multiple lawsuits filed on behalf of workers.
Pie joints ranging from institutions like L&B Spumoni Gardens to hipster upstart Roberta’s have been hit with suits, sometimes multiple times, that end up in hundreds of thousands in settlements often paid out to undocumented immigrants, mostly from South and Central America, that staff many city pizzerias.
Even Little Italy’s Lombardi’s, purported to be the first pizzeria in the United States, settled a claim for $75,000 in 2021 to six workers who sued for wage theft claims.
The restaurants often settled the claims with their workers without admitting wrongdoing and some end up back in court litigating the same issues again.
Jordan Sapon, 22, had never eaten pizza before he immigrated to New York City from his hometown in Guatemala in 2016 at the age of 14.
As an undocumented worker, he acquired a taste for it in 2018, when he landed a job at Francesco’s Pizzeria at 186 Columbus Ave., a no-frills pie place four blocks north of Lincoln Center.
Starting at the age of 16, he dedicated the next six years to the restaurant doing everything from mopping and cleaning to folding pizza boxes to making pies and delivering...
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