Forty-six people who worked at NY Gyro locations in Minneapolis and Willmar, Minnesota are owed $613,037 in back wages, the Labor Department found after investigating four of the chain's nine Minnesota locations. Investigators documented unpaid overtime, failure to keep proper records of hours worked, and at least one employee paid below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. [1]

Divide it out and the average is $13,327 a worker. That is not a rounding error on a paycheck; it is years of hours.

The owner, Nasir Khan, denies wrongdoing but agreed to pay. He told CBS Minnesota that record-keeping was the primary issue and that the company has since given its franchise partners training and hired an additional accountant in Minneapolis. [1] That is his account, and it belongs in the record beside the department's findings.

The second case is harder to explain as bookkeeping. In the Eastern District of Michigan, a consent judgment entered in May and reported this week requires Kiriakos Vlahadamis and four Leo's Coney Island franchise companies, in Sterling Heights, Clarkston, Dearborn and Livonia, to pay $515,857 in overtime wages and damages to 143 employees, plus $73,784 in penalties and $10,000 in attorney fees. [2]

The allegation is that the franchises paid workers "straight-time rates for all hours worked when they were legally obligated to pay them time-and-one-half their regular rate of pay for all hours over 40 in a workweek." [2] The mechanism is the part worth reading twice. Investigators alleged the defendants "maintained two sets of timecards for employees to separate regular hours worked up to 40 per week from any overtime hours," and that "timecards tracking overtime hours were regularly destroyed." [2]

One set of cards for the hours they paid for. Another for the hours they did not. Then a shredder.

A note on timing: the Michigan judgment was entered May 26 and only surfaced in coverage this week, so it is news to the public rather than new to the court. [2] A note on sourcing: the Labor Department's own releases were unreachable to us, so both cases here are sourced to the fetched reporting rather than to the agency's pages.

Between them, 189 workers, and roughly $1.1 million that was theirs the whole time.