N.Y. / RegionJudge Tells Korean-Res

N.Y. / Region
Judge Tells Korean-Restaurant Owner in Queens to Pay $2.7 Million in Back Wages

By LIZ ROBBINSMARCH 23, 2015
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Kum Gang San, a Korean restaurant in Flushing, Queens. The company still owes $2 million from a 2010 ruling in Manhattan. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
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During the busiest banquet season at Kum Gang San, a venerable 24-hour Korean restaurant in Flushing, Queens, employees said they often worked more than 16 hours, with no overtime, and earned less than the minimum wage. When times were slow, workers had to shovel snow from the owner’s driveway and move the owner’s son to a new apartment.

But the final indignity that prompted employees to file a lawsuit in 2012 came after workers were told to pick cabbage at a farm outside the city on their day off. When they refused, the workers said, they were suspended.

Last Thursday, a federal magistrate judge ruled that Kum Gang San, the owner, Ji Sung Yoo, and two restaurant managers owed the 11 employees who had filed a lawsuit claiming wage theft $2.67 million.

“I do see this as a victory because this lawsuit, yes, was about getting the money we were owed, but it was also about changing conditions,” Chul Park, 47, one of the plaintiffs, said through an interpreter on Sunday outside the restaurant. “Even though I am no longer working here, I know that this is going to impact the workers who are here now.”

The case is the latest involving an ethnic restaurant that has been found to exploit workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants from the same country as the restaurant bosses.

A federal magistrate judge, Michael H. Dolinger, wrote in his decision that Kum Gang San not only persisted in paying employees “grossly substandard wages and diverting some of their tip income, but — in violation of statutes and regulations — they made sure to deny the workers any information that would disclose the violations of their rights.”

The company, Kum Gang Inc., has come under scrutiny in the past because of its labor practices, dating from 2005 when the state found its Manhattan restaurant had been shortchanging employees and not keeping proper records. In 2010, the Flushing restaurant was fined $4,000 for violating child labor laws.

After a separate investigation of the Manhattan restaurant that finished in 2010, the state ordered the restaurant to pay $1.95 million in damages for wages owed to 66 employees. The company, which lost its appeal, has yet to pay.

Kenneth Kimerling, the legal director for the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund who represented the plaintiffs, was skeptical that Mr. Yoo would pay the damages ordered by the judge.

“This is another clear example of the wage theft that is going on in the restaurant industry in this country and in this city, particularly in restaurants where there are immigrant workers,” Mr. Kimerling said.

Mr. Yoo, speaking through a friend, Sang J. Kim, disputed the claims of the workers and said he was suffering financially. Mr. Yoo said through Mr. Kim that he would appeal.

“He is very upset,” Mr. Kim said, explaining that Mr. Yoo did not speak English and had asked him to translate. “Business is so bad, about the last two years. We don’t have enough money to hire good lawyers. That’s one of the reasons we cannot explain at the court.”
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Mr. Yoo’s lawyers, Robert Giusti and Katie E. Ambroziak, did not immediately return messages for comment.

The Manhattan location of Kum Gang San on 32nd Street, Mr. Kim said, closed a month ago because it could not pay the rent. That restaurant opened in 1997.

Last year, Mr. Yoo’s wife opened a restaurant in Rockefeller Center, New York Kimchi, and it did not take long for workers there to protest. Last week, they filed a lawsuit claiming that the restaurant refused to pay overtime and that they were not receiving their tips on credit card payments.

On Sunday at Kum Gang San, the aroma of barbecue wafted through the dark-wooded dining room. The waiters were dressed in crisp Oxford shirts and the attached banquet hall played host to a party, seemingly a humming operation.

One manager and a defendant in the lawsuit, Chun Sik Yu, said through a translator that it was the first he had heard about the loss.

“I don’t understand the decision,” Mr. Yu said. “I don’t agree with it.”

Mr. Yoo said he treated his employees well. He responded to the decision by first critiquing Mr. Park, one of the plaintiffs, for stealing $34,800 from the banquet reservations fund in 2008. Mr. Park, both parties said, paid the money back and worked for another five years before quitting. He now drives a truck in Brooklyn.

Of the company’s 250 employees, nearly 30 wanted to join the lawsuit, but they were threatened by the owner with dismissal, said one plaintiff, Eutemio Morales, a buser until last year at the Flushing restaurant. He said he often traveled to other Northeast cities for 18-hour catering jobs, fixed the restaurant plumbing without training and picked up linens at the owner’s house.

“I felt the pressure was increasing and they were adding more jobs, and I wasn’t getting any extra,” Mr. Morales, 30, said through a translator, Jose Perez, deputy legal counsel at LatinoJustice PRLDEF, which also represented the plaintiffs.

The vegetable picking was the worst job Mr. Morales endured. When Mr. Yu asked him to show up at 8 a.m. on his day off, to be bused to a vegetable farm in New Jersey, Mr. Morales said Mr. Yu said: “Don’t ask why. You’re just here early, you’re going to work.”

In a statement submitted by Mr. Kim, Mr. Yoo said the farm outing was for a company picnic. The statement added: “About attending employees’ working related to the produce, we acknowledge that it’s the company’s mistake. But it’s not true that there was forceful requirement of working.”

But when workers did not attend a “voluntary” function, they were taken off the schedule, Mr. Morales said. Now he works at a supermarket, where he knows his rights.

“I feel good, I feel proud,” Mr. Morales said. “Otherwise I would have continued to be exploited.”