[R]uss Scully, the owner of two Burlington restaurants — The Spot on Shelburne Road and Spot on the Dock on Burlington’s waterfront — will pay more than $100,000 for overtime and child labor violations after a federal Department of Labor investigation.
The DOL announced Monday that The Spot LLC has paid $55,546 in back pay and an equal amount in damages to 91 current and former employees for failing to pay time and half for overtime, as required under Fair Labor Standards Act regulations. The restaurants were paying employees straight wages for their hours even when they exceeded 40 hours a week.
Additionally, Scully’s company paid $2,360 for child labor violations. The Spot LLC employed three 15-year-olds outside the hours allowed for that age group. Some of the youth worked later than 11 p.m. — past the 9 p.m. summer limit enforced by the FLSA, and far past the 7 p.m. school year limit, the DOL said.
Minors also worked more than three hours on school days, more than eight hours on non-school days, and more than 18 hours during school weeks, all of which violated child labor laws. The operator also failed to maintain required records documenting a minor’s date of birth, the DOL said.
Scully said Monday that the violations happened in the summer of 2017, after he opened a second restaurant on the Burlington waterfront. Scully said he didn’t know that he was required by federal law to pay time and a half for overtime, or to limit the working hours of the 15-year-olds.
“Everyone was in startup mode. Everyone was working a lot of hours, trying to get things up and running and making the place work,” he said. “We paid everyone for every hour they worked, but we didn’t understand we had to pay them time and a half according to the U.S. Department of Labor.”
An employee who no longer worked for the company contacted the DOL last autumn, he said.
“As soon as we understood we were in the wrong, we quickly corrected it,” he said, contacting all the people who had worked there at the time to pay them. “Virtually all the payments were made before the end of 2018. For a lot of people it was a big end-of-the-year bonus.”
Daniel Cronin, director of the DOL’s wage and hour division for northern New England, said in a statement that the law protects workers and also levels the playing field for employers who are already in compliance.
“We encourage employers to reach out to us for understanding wage and hour laws,” Cronin said.
Scully said the DOL fined the restaurants the equivalent of the missing back pay, so he ended up paying twice what he had originally owed.
“It was a big education for us and a costly mistake,” he said.
