Most Senate cafeteria workers mistreated on wages, top Capitol official says

WASHINGTON: A majority of the roughly 90 blue- collar restaurant workers serving the US Senate were improperly classified by their private employer, a top US Capitol administrator told a congressional committee last week, putting them at risk of being underpaid and prompting a Labour Department inquiry into the matter.

The workers employed by Restaurant Associates have sought higher wages for more than a year, and a December contract renegotiation appeared on its face to deliver better pay and benefits. But several workers said they were subsequently reclassified into new, lowerpaying jobs, thus cheating them out of the raise they were expecting.

One worker, for instance, told The Washington Post in January that he had gone from being a cook to a “food service worker,” a classification that meant the difference between US$ 13.80 an hour and US$17.45 an hour.

Architect of the Capitol Stephen T. Ayers told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday that the misclassifications were more widespread than previously known.

“We thought we were doing a good thing only to be surprised only a week or two later to learn that the pay rates we agreed to were not going to be paid,” Ayers said at the hearing last week.

Soon after the renegotiated contract went into effect in mid-December, Ayers said, it became clear that a handful of employees had been misclassified - raising suspicions about a more pervasive problem. Ayers’s deputies then interviewed 86 of the cafeteria and restaurant employees. That inquiry determined that 35 employees were classified properly, said Laura Condeluci, a spokeswoman for Ayers; the other 51 were not. — WP-Bloomberg