Diva in trouble for paying below minimum wage?!

[jonbastonin.livejournal.com]

Just saw this and I cannot believe they were trying to get away with paying their employees less than $5 an hour!

Will be going to Namaskar from now on...food is better there anyways.

www.wickedlocal.com/somerville/news/x767223217/Workers-claim-owner-of-Diva-Lounge-in-Somerville-exploited-them#axzz1LWHHppM7

Comments

Re: better NOT to go

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

I would suggest that you look at it the other way--don't rule restaurants out based on unfair labor practices, rule restaurants in based on fair labor practices.

Re: better NOT to go

[eredien]

I agree that you should definitely rule restaurants in based on good labor practices. I also agree that not every restaurant is going to be sterling, but there is a difference between, say, restaurants that pay minimum wage where working there is a drag but at least you get paid fairly, and restaurants that pay below minimum wage and deliberately hire workers desperate for a job and unfamiliar with their rights to get a few years' worth of labor out of them before they become aware they are not getting treated in a legally correct or ethically ok manner.

If you don't send a message to the restaurants which have poor labor practices by not going there to spend your $, what incentive are they going to have to change? If you keep going, they see, "we don't have to change because we still get your money." If you don't go, they see, "we have to change because otherwise we won't get your money."

I have other problems with Diva that have stopped me from going there (a few years ago on Valentine's Day they were handing out flowers--but only to straight couples!, plus the one time I did go there for a work function, I didn't like the food and found the waitstaff really rude when I asked them what was in one of the buffet items), but now that I know that Dosa Factory is run by the same people and they exploit their workers at one location, I really don't feel comfortable going there until I know they have changed their practices across the board. Just because they got caught in one restaurant doesn't mean that they will change at the others, unless provided with incentive to do so.

Obviously, the government can only provide so much incentive (as the $70,000+ in back taxes attests). What incentive it can provide is big, and slow, and sometimes ineffective up until the last resort of things like being tried in court. It's the people who go to these places who must provide the rest, and we make our decisions quickly, whenever 200 individual people decide in five minutes where to go for lunch.