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Cyprus Cafe owner broke labor laws

Alison Dance found liable for $27,194.82 in minimum-wage violations

The U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division determined that Durango restaurateur Alison Dance violated minimum-wage, overtime, record-keeping and child-labor laws while operating Cyprus Cafe.

The Labor Department’s investigation of Dance’s business practices spanned the two years between Aug. 20, 2012, and August 2014.

The Durango Herald obtained a copy of the DOL investigator’s findings this week through sources with first-hand knowledge of the investigation.

According to the report, the agency – which is empowered only to enforce minimum-wage laws – found Dance liable for $27,194.82 in minimum-wage violations affecting 28 employees as a result of the restaurant’s tip-pooling arrangement. Servers were asked to offer a share of their tips with the kitchen staff. Dance has long admitted that she erred in making Cyprus servers – whom she paid a lesser minimum wage – share their tips with the kitchen staff. She blamed the error on ignorance of Wage Order 30, the law forbidding this.

The agency also found that Dance broke other labor laws during the two-year period it investigated after Cyprus employees filed complaints alleging Dance had engaged in wage theft that affected most, if not all, of the staff.

In an interview Thursday, Dance said that the DOL’s findings were inaccurate. She said she had never denied altering timecards, a practice she said was widespread in the restaurant industry. She said the only reason that the Labor Department had sided against her was because she couldn’t prove that every time she had edited timecards, she had done so with the employees’ permission.

“It wasn’t malicious,” she said. “It wasn’t fraud. The fact is, I didn’t keep every scrap of paper. I didn’t keep records the way the DOL wanted me to. Stop dragging me through the mud, because it’s done.”

In the initial complaints filed with the Labor Department, former Cyprus front-house manager Kristin Harmon, who worked at Cyprus for eight years, and former lead line cook David McClelland said that Dance had, in effect, withheld thousands of dollars that rightfully should have gone to employees by refusing to pay overtime and deleting the hours that employees worked. They said she routinely shaved hours from employees’ timecards by manually adjusting them through the restaurant’s accounting program.

After reviewing Cyprus’s books, the final report found both allegations to be “substantiated.” It determined Dance owed $2,496 to seven employees for overtime back wages.

In a section dealing with “inaccurate hours worked,” the report said a review of Cyprus’s time records shows Dance edited workers’ hours. It said Dance explained the edits “were requested by the workers because they forgot to clock in or out and that many workers used her password to alter the hours-worked records.”

The report found that “Ms. Dance was not able to provide records to prove the editing punch being requested by the workers, and many (edits) show that, for example, workers physically clocked out at 10 p.m., but the clock was changed to 9 p.m.”

Though the agency sided against Dance, it does not have legal authority to award back pay or damages to affected employees stemming from timecard manipulation or overtime violations for non-minimum wage employees. But the finding opens the door to former employees to file civil lawsuits against Dance.

In an interview Wednesday, Harmon, one of the two employees who originally complained to the Labor Department, said the findings were bittersweet. She said the final report vindicated the whistleblowers, and they ensured that “a lot of people got paid. But the money was paid for the tipping-pool violations, which was probably an honest mistake. Whereas taking people’s hours was very intentional.”

Harmon, who said her timecards were edited by Dance, received no money from the tipping violations because she was not a minimum-wage employee.

The final report also found that Dance violated child-labor laws on two occasions in which minors worked later in the evening than lawfully allowed.

The Labor Department’s investigation of Dance concluded Aug. 19. Since then, the Herald has twice sought copies of the findings. Labor Department officials denied both requests, saying the investigation was still open.

In a phone message, department spokesman Juan Rodriguez said he would need to talk with agency experts specializing in the Freedom of Information Act before releasing or discussing the agency’s findings.

cmcallister@durangoherald.com



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