Suit says firm cheated staff of health benefits
City Attorney Dennis Herrera is suing the operators of the City Sightseeing tour bus company for allegedly failing to make mandatory health care payments for more than 200 employees over a threeyear period.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court, Herrera claims the companies that own City Sightseeing withheld $640,000 in health care payments from 215 employees and flouted a city law that requires businesses to fund at least a portion of their employees’ health care costs.
Herrera is also seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines in addition to recovering the payments from the companies and their CEO, Christian Watts, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit. City Sightseeing curates a variety of tourist trips in San Francisco and
across the Bay Area. City Sightseeing did not respond to a request for comment on the suit. Efforts to reach the companies that own City Sightseeing were also unsuccessful, and Watts did not immediately reply to a message sent via LinkedIn.
Herrera accused City Sightseeing of acting with “impunity” in a statement, claiming the operating companies and Watts refused to cooperate with the city’s Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, triggering 10 separate notices of violations and fines that preceded the lawsuit.
“City Sightseeing has been given every chance to do the right thing. Instead, Mr. Watts has thumbed his nose at the law,” Herrera said.
“Now it’s time to hold him accountable and send a clear message: Following the law isn’t optional. We are going to make sure that cheating employees out of their health care isn’t worth it for a company’s bottom line, or for executives who try to hide behind their corporations.”
San Francisco law requires large and mediumsized businesses to help employees pay for health care. Companies contribute money based on the number of hours each employee works. They can use that money to pay for employee health insurance or programs that reimburse workers for outofpocket health care costs, or give the money to the city, which uses it to provide medical coverage. Herrera’s lawsuit accuses City Sightseeing of failing to make its required health care contributions from July 2014 to June 2017.
The city attorney’s office has gone after several businesses for similar violations in recent years. Hornblower Yachts and Alcatraz Cruises paid $2.7 million last year to settle a case Herrera brought accusing them of illegally denying health insurance and benefits to hundreds of employees; the companies did not admit wrongdoing. In 2014, Herrera’s office got 19 San Francisco restaurants to pay $844,000 in health insurance contributions to 1,500 employees.