Chickie's and Pete's wait staff get big payday
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
This week, former and current restaurant workers began getting checks for the money they are owed from federal settlements against Chickie’s & Pete’s. The popular chain of sports bars faces two separate reckonings: $6.8 million to be paid to 1,159 workers as a result of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, and $1.68 million to another group of 90 workers who sued the company.
Those in the private suit began getting their checks on Monday. The rest of the payback, overseen by the Wage and Hour Division, is still in the works. “The agency hopes to start mailing out notices to the affected employees sometime this week,” writes Joanna Hawkins, press representative in the Labor Department’s Philly office. “We cannot put a timeline on when the distribution of back wages would be totally complete.” She says it was one of the agency's “largest tipped-employee investigations in recent years.”
Owner Pete Ciarrocchi’s improper practice of taking two-thirds of the tip pool first came to light in City Paper’s Aug. 7, 2012 story, “The Crime That Pays,” alleging wage theft in Philadelphia. The article referred to Chickie’s & Pete’s only as “one of the city’s better-known sports bars” and relied on information from a source who did not want his name or place of employment revealed for fear of retaliation. The piece prompted a call from the Labor Department to City Paper, asking whether the unnamed establishment would be a good place for inspectors to acquire “Crabfries,” one of Chickie’s & Pete’s signature dishes.
