Five employees of Pop-Up Chicken Shop lost their jobs on the Fourth of July after telling owner Aaron Francis they wouldn't work without the time-and-a-half listed in the company's employee handbook.
Francis says he was within his rights. Illinois doesn't require holiday pay, and it's an at-will state, where workers can generally be fired for almost any reason.
"We made an amendment to company policy," Francis said Monday at the restaurant's Bloomington location. "We let everyone know well in advance — well over seven days in advance — that due to Illinois labor laws, we do not have to pay time-and-a-half."
He also said the handbook's first page states it is not a legal contract.
Francis added, "I 100% stand behind the wages that I was paying every single employee that I fired, and I thought it was very greedy for them to expect me to pay time-and-a-half."
But a University of Illinois professor who studies how employment relationships end said the fired workers may have as many as four possible avenues of legal recourse.
"There is no specific statute or regulation for holiday pay in Illinois," said Michael LeRoy, a labor and employment law professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "But I don't think the story ends there."
LeRoy stressed he could not offer a definitive conclusion about this dispute. Speaking generally, he laid out where the law gets complicated.
On the morning of July 4, Francis said, about...
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