Central Florida Bakery pays $28,055 in back wages and damages

Central Florida Bakery

Sandford-based organisation Central Florida Bakery has paid $28,055 (£22,227.98) in back wages and liquidated damages to 18 employees, due to violations of the US Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

The employer’s breaches of the minimum wage, overtime and recordkeeping provisions of the FLSA were uncovered following an investigation by the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) of the US Department of Labor.

WHD investigators found that Central Florida Bakery paid one employee a weekly salary that failed to cover all of the hours worked at the minimum wage of $7.25 (£5.75) per hour. The organisation also paid overtime-eligible employees flat salaries, without regard to the number of hours they had worked, which therefore resulted in overtime violations when more than 40 hours a week were worked.

Additional overtime breaches were incurred by Central Florida Bakery when it failed to include earned bonuses in workers’ rates when calculating overtime. The WHD also discovered the employer had failed to maintain accurate records of the hours employees worked.

A previous WHD investigation of the employer in 2015 also discovered overtime violations.

Daniel White, Jacksonville district director for the WHD, said: “Employers have the responsibility to pay employees all the wages they have legally earned. We encourage employers to contact us with any questions they may have, and to use the wide variety of tools we offer to help them understand their obligations and to comply with the law.”

Central Florida Bakery was unavailable for comment at the time of publication.