So I was hoping someone here would be able to point me in the right direction and to see if my suspicions of wage theft were right. Since April I was working at this restaurant in the back of house up until a couple weeks ago when I was fired. Through the past few months I realized that we were supposed to be getting one half hour break for meal a day, and from April first all the way to late October I had only taken one break (wasn’t even a full 30). After a little discussion with some coworkers I realized that it’s basically been the same for them, now some chefs will say that sometimes you don’t have time to stop and that’s true, however I noticed that they were taking a half hour out of our paycheck each day we worked for that meal break we didn’t have time to take.
I looked online and found that legally we are supposed to get that break, but if we can’t take it or are forced to work through the meal break/eat while we work it’s supposed to be paid, and it hadn’t been the whole time. I mentioned something to my supervisor and he was pissed because he realized it was being done to him too, however whenever I asked him if he talked to the own he brushed me off and did this for months. We had a new manager come in October who was supposed to deal with things and I brought this issue up to him after getting the okay from my supervisor and he seemed like he wanted to do something but was told he would need until summer to do something, shortly after this however I was fired, the reason given was that I didn’t get a doctors note one time when I was sick and for being late.
For taxes recently I printed out my pay stubs and time sheets and noticed some discrepancies, for one, they went into my timesheets and actually added on those breaks to cover their tracks, you can see that they added it in after because it would say the break was at 12:00:00 pm on the dot each time, which is stupid because that’s when service starts, and they did this down the board except for here and there. I also believe that The federal holidays we worked were supposed to be time and a half but was only regular pay, I may be wrong that’s one of things I’m questioning.
My question is how should I deal with this? If I’m not mistaken taking out time for the breaks I was supposed to get but didn’t get would be wage theft, but they seem to add in those breaks on the computer after the fact. Who would I talk to about this (I live in New York)? Like is there some labor board who deals with this sort of thing? And how do I go about filing a complaint or talking to someone because with them adding in the breaks when I never got one or worked through them would the complaint even be valid?
Any help here is appreciated because I think it’s a couple thousand dollars I lost from this place and I don’t know where to start.