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A Japanese restaurant in Bangor reached an agreement with state labor officials on Wednesday to resolve nearly 2,000 labor law violations identified during a state investigation earlier this year.
The agreement subjects Green Tea Restaurant to a four-year period of monitoring by the Maine Department of Labor and will require it to pay $100,000 in fines, according to a copy obtained by the Bangor Daily News. That sum is the largest financial penalty issued to a business for violating labor laws so far in 2024 — by a wide margin, according to the labor department.
If the restaurant violates the terms of the agreement, it will be required to pay the original $249,824 in penalties that state investigators assessed when it issued Green Tea citations in March and June.
Those citations, which became public after the settlement was reached, state that Green Tea paid employees in cash-stuffed envelopes at the end of the month without keeping accurate records of how much they worked; didn’t allow staff to earn paid time off; broke rules around employing a 15-year-old during hours he should have been in school; and underpaid workers by nearly $50,000 by violating minimum wage and overtime laws.
The new documents provide more specific details about the state’s labor law investigation into Green Tea, which the Bangor Daily News first reported on Thursday.
An attorney for Green Tea, Pawel Binczyk of Bernstein Shur, declined an interview Friday.
In January, state labor officials opened an investigation into Green Tea on Bangor Mall Boulevard and issued the restaurant its first citation on March 18. The citation detailed 1,710 violations of state labor statutes.
The following day, state labor officials contacted federal immigration officials to seek deportation protections for Green Tea employees, so the restaurant’s employees wouldn’t be afraid to participate in the state’s ongoing investigation, the BDN reported Thursday.
That letter, which the BDN obtained a copy of from a former restaurant employee, described how Maine’s Labor Department has increasingly moved to prioritize investigations into “businesses in industries and with characteristics that indicate a high probability of finding multiple violations” such as “restaurants in urban areas with low paid workers, particularly those employing immigrant workers.”
The March 18 citation stated that Green Tea failed to compensate many of its employees in a timely manner when it handed out paychecks at the end of the month. Maine labor law requires employers to pay their staff “at regular intervals not to exceed 16 days.”
The state also identified 1,300 instances of when the restaurant did not keep daily records of the hours worked by each employee, though state law requires it. For example, the restaurant didn’t track how many hours one employee worked on 158 occasions between April and December 2023, the citation states. The restaurant also failed to record the dates and amounts paid to employees on 64 different occasions, the citation shows.
Green Tea did not provide back-of-the-house staff — meaning the employees who worked in the kitchen, not servers — with pay statements. “Instead, the employers generally handed these employees cash-stuffed envelopes, once per month,” the citation reads.
Those employees were then asked to sign a document acknowledging that their paycheck accurately reflected their wages and overtime, and, because the employees spoke little English, some told state investigators that they did not understand what they were signing.
During the investigation, Green Tea’s owners admitted the paperwork “did not actually reflect the employees’ working conditions. Further, the total wages often did not correspond to the hours worked,” according to the citation. They suggested that the meals and lodging they provided for their staff made up for the difference in missing wages, but could not show the state how they arrived at those calculations.
“The numbers were seemingly plucked out of thin air,” the citation reads. “The net effect of this system was that the back of house employees had no way to understand why their employers were paying them the amount they were nor the reasons for deductions made.”
Businesses are also supposed to allow staff to earn paid time off, but Green Tea did not allow workers to accumulate paid leave and could not provide the state with “a plausible rationale for effectively ignoring this statute in its entirety.”
The state has rules for how many hours a 16- or 17-year-old employee can work, and a prohibition on allowing teens up to the age of 17 to work during school hours. Green Tea’s 132 violations of so-called child labor laws applied to a single 15-year-old, the citation states.
When interviewed by state investigators, he told them he was 16, but his license showed otherwise, and two other employees said was younger. Green Tea’s management told the state that they believed he was 16 but made no efforts to verify that, according to the citation, and they were aware that he was not in school because he worked “every school day except Monday.”
In June, the state issued Green Tea a second citation for an additional 261 violations. The restaurant owed workers $15,593 in unpaid minimum wages and $34,294 in unpaid overtime.
When the Labor Department issues a citation, it has determined that the business has violated state law. Businesses that dispute the violations have 15 days to appeal, initiating a process that can end any time if the state and employer reaches a settlement agreement in court.
The settlement agreement reached Wednesday names the owner of Green Tea as C&L Asian Restaurant LLC, registered to Zhi Lin, who goes by Joyce Lin.
In addition to imposing a period of state monitoring and reducing some of the fines, the settlement also requires management to attend training with the state and post notices inside the restaurant that explain laws related to child labor, minimum wage, sexual harassment, whistle blower protections and human trafficking.
Green Tea is required to pay $50,000 to the state by the end of 2024, which will go into a fund to be paid out to workers owed unpaid wages. The agreement says that the state and restaurant have not been able to locate every worker entitled to unpaid time.
The restaurant must pay the rest of the fine in smaller increments over the next three years.