Sidney Torres IV has paid back wages to 105 employees of his IV Waste garbage-collection company after he improperly denied them bonuses and overtime while failing to accurately log some of their hours, federal officials said Tuesday.
Torres paid his employees flat daily rates even when they worked more than 40 hours a week, and failed to account for “certain types of bonuses” when calculating those rates, the U.S. Department of Labor said in a news release. He agreed to pay $106,672 in back wages.
The department said Torres’ actions violated federal labor law, which requires that hourly workers be paid at least time-and-a-half when they work more than 40 hours a week.
Troy Mouton, a federal labor official in New Orleans, said those obligations are designed to prevent workers from being shortchanged.
“These essential workers perform hard manual labor, often in incredibly taxing weather conditions," Mouton said. "They deserve every cent that they earn.”
Torres also kept inaccurate records of employees’ time, the release said. Other details weren’t available and a Labor Department spokesperson didn’t return a message seeking comment Tuesday.
Torres said the issue began with a “routine” federal audit and covered a “small number of employees” who all had agreed to be paid under the fixed rates.
“We had completely the right to argue and dispute it,” he said. He said he employs “several hundred” workers.
Instead, IV Waste “decided to pay the disputed amounts,” Torres said in a...
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