Wigle Whiskey will be required to pay nearly $39,000 in back wages to 41 workers after a federal investigation found that the business had violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by requiring employees to share tips with managers and supervisors.
The ruling against the Strip District distillery and restaurant was announced in a Wednesday news release from the Department of Labor.
When it launched in 2012, Wigle was the first distillery to open in Pittsburgh since Prohibition. Its owners helped lobby the state legislature to allow distilleries to sell spirits directly to the public, paving the way for a flurry of new craft distilleries in the region.
A decade later, the award-winning spirits maker is under scrutiny. The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division found that the business allowed managers to retain tips received by tipped workers, in violation of FLSA regulations, which prohibit employers, managers and supervisors from sharing in tip pools.
The investigation also found that Wigle had not paid tipped employees adequate overtime wages, by calculating the employee overtime rate based on their cash wage of $4 per hour rather than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. The company also underpaid managers for overtime work by failing to include wages managers received via the improper tip pool in overtime calculations.
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