Hotels, private clubs, restaurants, caterers and other hospitality businesses often rely on third party staffing companies to supplement their workforce for catered and other private events. These supplemental workers are necessary for the vitality of hospitality businesses whose workforce demands often ebb and flow seasonally, or even from week to week. However, using third-party staffing companies can create significant legal risk for hotel concerning wage and hour liability. Nevertheless, there are a number of “best practices” that a hotel can implement to minimize the risk of being found to be a joint employer of the third-party staff.
Over the last several years, the hospitality industry has had to defend lawsuits filed by the workers of third-party staffing companies claiming that the hotel, caterer or similar venue violated wage and hour law by not properly paying such workers, withholding gratuities that should have been paid to them, or assessing a fee that the “reasonable customer” would believe was a gratuity that should have been paid to the workers.
Essentially, these suits claim that the hotel and the third-party staffing company were the “joint employer” of such workers enabling them to sue to hotel for damages. These actions are generally filed as collective and/or class actions in which the worker seeks to represent all workers of the hotel and all third-party staffing companies used by the hotel who were impacted by the same allegedly...
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