Old Town restaurant faces wage lawsuit
Owner: Staff has been paid for hours worked
When Louis Jackson started his job as a server at Hacienda del Rio, things were good.
Balloon Fiesta and holiday crowds meant plenty of diners were visiting the Old Town restaurant, and their margarita orders kept the tips flowing.
But Jackson says that when business slowed — when tips waned and wait staff most need its paychecks — things took a turn for the worse.
“The checks start bouncing like basketballs,” he said.
“I tried at least nine or 10 different times on one check,” he said. “It was just like worthless paper.”
Without those checks, his automatic bill payments failed, his account was overdrafted, and he resorted to donating blood and selling his shoe collection to make ends meet.
State and local agencies on
Thursday filed a lawsuit against Hacienda del Rio, associated entities and principals David Ray Rosales and Andres Rosales, alleging a systematic practice of disregarding wage laws “for their own enrichment and on the backs of their employees.”
In just two years, the defendants have been the subject of dozens of employee complaints for violations including failure to pay regular and overtime wages, taking unauthorized payroll deductions and issuing bad checks, the suit alleges. The lawsuit, filed in state District Court in Albuquerque, is being brought by the Department of Workforce Solutions, the city and 2nd Judicial District attorney on behalf of Jackson and 32 more employees who say they were shorted amounts ranging from $92 to $5,000.
The lawsuit is seeking repayment for unpaid wages, interest, punitive damages, injunctive relief requiring defendants to comply with state and municipal law, among other things.
Reached Thursday afternoon, Andres Rosales said he is prepared to fight the allegations and plans to file a countersuit.
“We have compensated our team members for all of their hours worked,” he said. “We do not feel that we have violated any laws.”
In a news conference Thursday, the heads of each agency suggested the suit could be the start of a broader effort to enforce wage laws, which Mayor Tim Keller says had gone unenforced for years.
According to the complaint, in August 2018, the Labor Relations Division of the Department of Workforce Solutions found that the defendants owed 20 employees nearly $18,000 in unpaid wages along with $80,000 in statutory damages and interest. They have not attempted to rectify the violations or to repay the owed amount, the complaint says. And since that August 2018 decision, the Labor Relations Division has received another 27 complaints.
The lawsuit alleges the defendants would issue a check for the amount owed to an employee after a claim was filed with the Labor Relations Division. But the division changed its practice in November 2017 and began assessing statutory damages, at which time the defendants stopped the payments and refused to cooperate with the division in any way.
“Since that time, LRD has observed that the number of employees bringing claims against defendants has steadily risen,” the suit says.
Workforce Solutions Secretary Bill McCamley said the department takes wage theft seriously and plans to target companies that have had long-standing issues.
“We’re basically trying to find some of the folks that have been historically the worst offenders, and that are obviously, in our opinion, seeking to do this strategically,” he said.
Jackson says he’s found a much better job since leaving Hacienda del Rio in June 2018. His paychecks never bounce.
He’d like to be repaid the $550 he says he’s owed, but what he’d like even more is to know this isn’t happening to anyone else.