Florida Domino’s Operators Wrangled in Wage and Hour Complaint Over Vehicle Expenses

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The companies and individuals who operate or used to operate 27 Domino’s pizza restaurants across West-Central Florida find themselves as defendants in a proposed class and collective action filed over alleged “repeated and willful” Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) abuses.  Along with three individual owners, the 35-page lawsuit names the below entities as defendants:

The plaintiff worked as a delivery driver at the defendants’ Zephyrhills location from around April 2015 through March 2018, the suit states. The woman alleges she and similarly situated drivers were deprived of mandatory minimum hourly wages as a result of the defendants’ failure to reimburse delivery workers for automobile and other job-related expenses.

“Regardless of the precise amount of the per-delivery reimbursement at any given point in time, [the defendants’] reimbursement formula has resulted in an unreasonable underestimation of delivery drivers’ automobile expenses throughout the recovery period, causing systematic violations of the minimum wage laws,” the lawsuit alleges.

Citing the IRS’s business mileage reimbursement rate as a reasonable approximation of proposed class members’ work expenses, the complaint likens the defendants’ alleged underpayment of vehicle costs to a kickback paid by delivery drivers to their employer sufficient enough to bump their wages below the minimum threshold.