The owners of the local chain restaurant
Taco Stop have been charged with violating the Fair Labor Standards Act after they allegedly failed to pay employees appropriate wages and tips.
A lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of the U.S. Department of Labor says the department’s Wage and Hour Division investigated defendants
Bertina Jimenez and
Arsene Agiss Jr. from June 2020 through June 2022. They are the co-owners of all Taco Stop locations.
Taco Stop’s primary restaurant is located at 513 N. Chicago Ave. in South Milwaukee. There is also a Taco Stop location at 12862 W. Bluemound Road in Elm Grove.
A third Taco Stop location at 2121 S. Kinnickinnic Ave. in Milwaukee closed in May 2021. A fourth location at 1440 E. Brady St. in Milwaukee closed in September 2022.
Jimenez and Agiss Jr. allegedly designated several employees as “floaters.” This meant the employees bounced between all of the Taco Stop locations to work as needed. The pair are accused of combining employees’ hours worked across all locations and providing a single paycheck for hours worked across all restaurants in a week.
Jimenez and Agiss Jr. “failed to keep and maintain” any time records throughout the two years of the investigation and “did not maintain proper payroll records,” according to the lawsuit.
Payroll records never showed an employee with more than 40 hours worked per week despite several cooks and cashiers regularly working more than 40 hours a week, the complaint states.
Jimenez and Agiss Jr. also allegedly failed to pay their employees overtime for hours worked after the 40-hour threshold and failed to pay them credit card tips.
"Font-of-house staff (cashiers and food runners) regularly received credit card tips," according to the complaint. "Defendants repeatedly kept the credit card tips earned by employees to pay cooks’ wages. In addition, defendants repeatedly kept credit card tips to pay other business expenses, such as rent and insurance."
Jimenez and Agiss Jr. owe 35 Taco Stop employees an unspecified amount of back wages and liquidated damages, according to the complaint.
"They are alleging but their investigation was fraudulent and misguided by a previous employee seeking legal status in the country who then went on to work for casa tequila and doing the same thing to them," according to a Wednesday statement from Taco Stop ownership. "We plan on fully fighting these allegations as they are not true in any way and we plan to show that their investigation was flawed and commenced through a fraudulent claim by an ex-employee seeking legal status in the country."
