Melissa “Kat” Steach, a Waffle House server in Marietta, Georgia, keeps odd hours. She spends much of her day in her motel room off Interstate 75. Around 9 p.m, she walks 500 feet across a gas station parking lot and clocks into her shift. Working as a tipped cashier and server, Steach said she also does untipped work before her shift ends at 7 a.m: mopping floors, cleaning toilets, scrubbing pots and pans.
The latter tasks, which Steach said take up to three hours per shift, are now the subject of a federal wage theft complaint. This fall, the Union of Southern Service Workers, a cross-sector affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor claiming that all those hours of untipped work constituted wage theft. Federal law allows employers to pay tipped workers less than regular minimum wage. (Disclosure: SEIU is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)
The complaint, still pending a decision from the Department of Labor, alleged that Waffle House restaurants save from $15.6 million to $46.8 million a year by having tipped workers perform untipped tasks without appropriate compensation.
If successful, the complaint could signal to the many restaurants beyond Waffle House’s nearly 2,000 outlets that wage theft has consequences. The company runs roughly 0.27% of the country’s more than 720,000 restaurants.
Wage theft — not paying workers what they are legally owed — is a common practice. As of 2017, the most recent year for which data was readily available, workers lose $15 billion annually in minimum wage violations alone. From 2021 to 2024, the Department of Labor recovered more than $1 billion in back wages and damages for 615,000 employees in the U.S.
“Wage theft can happen to anyone. It’s any time a worker is not paid the money for the labor that they do,” said Margaret Poydock, a senior policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute.
Researchers have found that tipped workers, such as servers, are particularly vulnerable to wage theft. Federal data from the U.S. Department of Labor also showed that food service workers, whom industry research shows are disproportionately female and nonwhite, experience more wage violations than workers in other low-wage industries.
The problem is particularly acute for Waffle House workers, according to a 2024 report from the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of labor unions. Of 488 Waffle House workers surveyed, 90% reported experiencing at least one form of wage theft in the last year. Three-quarters said they’d been required to perform job tasks before clocking in or after clocking out within the last year. (Workers surveyed were self-selecting, responding to a social media advertisement to participate in the survey.)
The Union of Southern Service Workers’ complaint to the Department of Labor also challenged a mandatory meal deduction of $3.15 per shift, even when servers don’t eat.
Waffle House declined repeated requests for comment.
USSW members point, however, to one form of wage theft in particular: performing janitorial or kitchen work while being paid a tipped wage, which 58% of surveyed tipped workers reported to the Strategic Organizing Center. Waffle House stores typically operate with “a skeleton crew” of cooks, servers and door greeters, said Dorothy Singletary, assistant general counsel at the SEIU. Stores don’t even hire janitors or dishwashers, she said, and largely use servers to pick up the slack. “It’s a systemic issue,” Singletary said.
The wage difference is significant. While many states require higher wages than the federal minimum, Georgia, where Steach lives, does not. Tipped wages start at the federal minimum cash wage of $2.13 an hour. By comparison, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour; Georgia’s minimum wage is $5.15 an hour, with limited exceptions in which the federal wage applies. Across the entire company, the complaint argued, using tipped servers to do the standard-wage work of janitors and dishwashers saves Waffle House between $15.6 million and $46.8 million a year.
A successful USSW complaint against Waffle House could have a ripple effect, the EPI’s Poydock said. “Research shows that when you impose penalties and you also name the employer, that kind of deters employers from committing violations of the law,” she said.
At the time of publication, neither the Department of Labor nor Waffle House had responded to the complaint.
The complaint came almost 18 months into a USSW campaign to pressure Waffle House to improve conditions ranging from workplace security to higher wages.
The campaign has seen some success.
In May, after a year of walkouts led by USSW supporters, Waffle House CEO Joe Rogers III announced companywide raises for the first time in more than 30 years. Even with Rogers’ promised boost of the tipped wage to a minimum of $3 an hour in effect, though, not much is easier for Steach.
For a 69-hour workweek in September, Steach’s pay stub showed 64 hours of tipped work ranging from $5.07 to $5.27 an hour, plus tips. In a five-day week, by Steach’s estimates, that meant she spent up to 15 hours working without tips. (The same check also appeared to list five hours’ pay at $14.75/hour, presumably for cooking.) Data shows that the living wage for a single-person household in Cobb County, where Steach lives, is $26.55 an hour.
For now, Steach’s wages cover the $315 a week rent for her motel room, into which she moved after a stint of living on the street. The take-home pay for that September check was $328.01. There’s little left over. The trade off? “I don’t eat,” she said.
Steach said that she has asked to train formally as a cook several times, hoping to move into a better-paid job, but said that managers have told her they don’t have the time to train her. Her next best option is to work double shifts when she can, doing more untipped work for tipped wages.
Meanwhile, Steach is pushing for a change.
“Corporations can’t keep throwing us around because we make all this money for them,” she said. “And what are they really doing with it? They are not supporting their workers. They can’t keep screwing us around. We’re here. We’re worth it.”
