Lawsuit Claims Tipped Employees at Romano’s Macaroni Grill Owed Unpaid Wages

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The operator of Romano’s Macaroni Grill restaurants faces a proposed collective action in which two former employees claim they and other tipped servers and bartenders were not paid proper wages.

Alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the 16-page case claims defendant Mac Acquisition, who operates Romano’s Macaroni Grill locations in Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and other states, has applied an unlawful tip credit to workers’ wages without fulfilling certain statutory requirements.

The lawsuit more specifically claims Mac should have paid tipped workers the full minimum wage, as opposed to the lower tip-credit wage, given they were not provided with proper notice of the tip credit, were required to perform non-tipped duties unrelated to their jobs, spent more than 20 percent of their work time performing related non-tipped tasks and were required to purchase uniforms without being reimbursed.

According to the suit, the defendant was required—and failed—to provide tipped servers and bartenders with proper notice of the tip credit before paying them a sub-minimum wage rate to be supplemented by tips. The case says workers were not properly informed:

• Of the amount of the cash wage to be paid to them;
• Of the amount by which their wages would increase as a result of the tip credit;
• That all tips received by each employee must be retained by the employee, except tips contributed to a valid tip pool; and
• That the tip credit does not apply if the employee does not receive proper notice.

The case goes on to claim that Romano’s Macaroni Grill employees were unlawfully paid a tip-credited rate for non-tip-generating tasks that were unrelated to their tipped duties. Per the lawsuit, the workers should have received the full minimum wage for unrelated tasks for which they could have earned tips, including washing dishes, warming bread, mopping floors, polishing wine glasses, scraping gum off tables, cutting cheese and fruit and making salads.

Tipped workers, according to the complaint, were also required to perform an unlawful amount of non-tipped side work related to their tipped duties. The case alleges tipped employees spent more than 20 percent of their time on non-tipped work, such as filling condiments, rolling silverware, brewing tea and coffee, filling ice and cleaning tables and wait stations, without being paid the full minimum wage for those duties.

According to the case, tipped employees were often required by the defendant to perform non-tipped work before the restaurant opened and after closing, when “there were no customers and no opportunity to earn tips,” yet also received a sub-minimum wage for these tasks.

Likewise, the lawsuit claims the defendant failed to pay catering employees, who have “limited interaction with customers,” the full minimum wage for delivering food, and similarly required servers who were working events in a private room to spend significant time setting up and cleaning without receiving the full minimum wage.

Finally, the lawsuit claims Mac required workers to pay for mandatory uniforms without reimbursement, which the suit says unlawfully reduced their wages to below the minimum hourly wage for tipped employees. 

The case alleges the defendant’s wage-and-hour failures have precluded the restaurant operator from being permitted to apply a tip credit to workers’ wages, and claims the employees are owed the full minimum wage.

“In other words, Defendant must account for the difference between the wages paid to Plaintiffs and all similarly situated workers and the minimum wage rate,” the complaint charges.

The lawsuit looks to cover former and current tipped employees who worked for the defendant for at least one week during the past three years. 

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