Our Region - Courts/Legal News
Comments (0) |

Olive Garden settles California servers' suit

Published: Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2008 | Page 3B

The Olive Garden chain of Italian restaurants has agreed to pay $706,525 to resolve a California-wide class action lawsuit in Sacramento federal court for waiters and waitresses claiming they were shorted and stalled on wages.

Once class attorneys, a class representative who worked with them, and a settlement administrator are paid, $441,525 will be divided among 5,458 qualifying class members who work or worked at Olive Gardens throughout the state between Aug. 3, 2003, and June 10.

Attorneys for both sides estimate each waiter or waitress will get approximately $80.

U.S. District Judge William B. Shubb approved the settlement Monday.

The servers accused the restaurants of violating California law by not paying "reporting time pay" – wages for half their usual day's work when they show up but are given less than half their usual day's work.

Former servers also claimed they did not receive in a timely fashion the compensation they had coming when their employment was terminated.

Olive Garden still contends the suit has no merit, but "the complexity, expense and likely duration of continued litigation" favor settlement.

The chain numbers 662 restaurants, has more than 80,000 employees and $3.1 billion in annual sales.


Call The Bee's Denny Walsh, (916) 321-1189.

Dear Readers,

Thank you for coming to sacbee.com. We welcome your participation in our commenting boards and forums, but we ask that you follow a few simple rules to keep the boards open and the discourse civil.

We reserve the right to delete comments that contain inappropriate links, obscenities or vulgarities, spam, hate speech, personal attacks, plagiarism or copyright violations. You can help notify us of potential abuses by flagging comments that you find offensive. Action will be taken against users who repeatedly or flagrantly violate the rules. Keep it clean and you should have no problems.

tool name

close
 
Sacramento Bee Job listing powered by Careerbuilder.com

Quick Job Search

View All Top Jobs
Buy
Used Cars
Dealer and private-party ads
Make:

Model:

Price Range:
to
Search within:
miles of ZIP

Advanced Search | 1982 & Older