Servers say the chain forces them to do janitorial work and dishwashing for lower tipped wages, robbing them of up to $46.8 million.

Melissa “Kat” Steach, a Waffle House server in Marietta, Georgia, keeps odd hours. She spends much of her day in her motel room off Interstate 75. Around 9 p.m, she walks 500 feet across a gas station parking lot and clocks into her shift. Working as a tipped cashier and server, Steach said she also does untipped work before her shift ends at 7 a.m: mopping floors, cleaning toilets, scrubbing pots and pans.

The latter tasks, which Steach said take up to three hours per shift, are now the subject of a federal wage theft complaint. This fall, the Union of Southern Service Workers, a cross-sector affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor claiming that all those hours of untipped work constituted wage theft. Federal law allows employers to pay tipped workers less than regular minimum wage. (Disclosure: SEIU is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

The complaint, still pending a decision from the Department of Labor, alleged that Waffle House restaurants save from $15.6 million to $46.8 million a year by having tipped workers perform untipped tasks without appropriate compensation.

If successful, the complaint could signal to the many restaurants beyond Waffle House’s nearly 2,000 outlets that wage theft has consequences. The company runs roughly 0.27% of the country’s more than 720,000 restaurants.

* * *

Wage theft—not paying workers what they’re legally owed—is a common practice. As of 2017, the most recent year for which data was readily available,........

© Fast Company