Photos by Billie Winter
If you work in the restaurant industry and your boss shorts your paycheck, you have limited options. You could quit, with or without sending your boss a nasty message, and start looking for a new gig. You could file a complaint with the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries or Seattle’s Office of Labor Standards, though the investigatory process typically takes months to complete. Or you could file a lawsuit, a choice that may lead you to the cramped, single-room office of Steven Toff.
Toff is the founder of Bread & Roses Law Group, a firm that specializes in employment law. He sues employers for discrimination of various kinds, for wage theft, and for denying workers mandatory breaks. Bread & Roses has taken on big employers like Boeing, Tesla, Whole Foods, and Thomson Reuters, but after Toff filed a class action lawsuit against the fine-dining restaurant Canlis in 2023, he became a go-to resource for restaurant workers in Seattle.
He’s sued restaurant owners, helped workers file complaints, and assisted employees looking to unionize. To him, it’s all an extension of his prior career as a labor organizer and union advocate; he wants to provide a way for workers in a precarious industry to claw back a few of their rights.
Restaurants, he says, are “where you see many of the problems I care most about: low wages, unstable schedules, tip dependency, informal (and often abusive) power structures, retaliation, and workers who...
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