Pay in restaurants isn’t usually high to begin with, but line prep cook Juan Sandoval says he rarely even gets the full pay he’s due.
Sandoval, who has worked in the Chicago restaurant scene for six years, told Truthout that his employers frequently fail to pay him time-and-a-half for working overtime hours above 40 hours a week. Right now, he said, he’s working 12 hours a day, yet he’s only getting paid $900 a week — what he’s owed for each regular hour, but minus the extra $400 he should get for overtime.
That missing $400 creates hardship not just for him and his two children, ages 17 and 19, but also for the siblings he often supports financially. “It leaves you with less money and also leaves you less time,” he said, speaking in Spanish through a translator. “So, it’s less money for your family and less time for your family.”
If he got paid correctly for his extra hours, he could cut his schedule down a bit more and go to culinary school. He could spend more time with his children. “When I don’t spend time [with them] it runs the risk of them being influenced by other people, me not being able to be as much of a role model,” he said.
But he hasn’t reported his mistreatment to anyone. “I wasn’t really sure where to go,” he said.
That’s why he got involved in a campaign to create a labor rights agency to closely regulate workplaces like his. “After many years of experiencing this kind of mistreatment, discrimination and rejection, I decided that it was really enough,” he said. “I felt an urge to really do something.”
His decision to speak out just paid off. On Wednesday, October 31, Chicago took a big step forward toward protecting city residents’ workplace rights: The city council approved the creation of a brand-new Office of Labor Standards charged with enforcing all of the city’s employment laws.
There are already enforcement agencies — the state department of labor, as well as the city’s Department of Consumer and…