Thirty-one people who cooked, cleaned and served food at a Pompano Beach buffet restaurant found out their steady “salary” was actually a way to avoid paying them what federal law requires. The U.S. Department of Labor says the restaurant’s owner now has to hand back $732,976 in back wages, an average of $23,644 per worker, because a flat monthly check doesn’t get an employer out of overtime rules.
Why a Flat Monthly Check Didn’t Exempt These Workers From Overtime
The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division investigated Lucky King LLC, which operates Miyako Japanese Buffet in Pompano Beach, Florida, and found the company paid most of its employees a flat amount ranging from $1,000 to $3,000 a month, no matter how many hours they actually worked. According to the agency’s September 3, 2026 release, those employees typically worked well over 40 hours a week — the point at which federal law requires time-and-a-half pay for most hourly workers.
Calling a paycheck a “monthly salary” does not automatically move a worker out of overtime protection. The label on a pay stub means nothing if the job itself doesn’t meet the legal tests that qualify it for an exemption. For most restaurant line cooks, servers and buffet staff, it doesn’t come close.
Free retirement updates: Enrollment and claim windows come and go, and missing one can cost you real money. The free Retirement Shield newsletter keeps you ahead of the deadlines that matter. Sign up free.
How the $732,976 Recovery Breaks Down
Divide $732,976 across 31 workers and you get an average of $23,644 apiece — a large number for people who were likely earning close to minimum wage in the first place. That average is exactly what it sounds like: a total divided by a headcount, not a promise that every worker’s check will match. The Department of Labor’s announcement doesn’t break out individual amounts, and back-wage recoveries commonly vary by how many hours each person actually worked and how long they were employed during the period under review.
What matters for your own paycheck is the mechanism, not the exact split. If your hours vary but your pay doesn’t, that mismatch is the same one investigators found at this restaurant. A monthly figure that sounds steady and even reassuring — the same amount landing in your account whether the week was slow or slammed — is precisely the setup wage-and-hour investigators are trained to flag, because it hides unpaid hours behind a number that never changes.
The Overtime Test the Law Actually Uses
The federal Fair Labor Standards Act sets a default rule: covered, nonexempt employees get one and a half times their regular rate for every hour worked beyond 40 in a workweek. To be legally exempt from that rule, a job generally has to clear two hurdles at once — a minimum guaranteed salary level and specific job duties (executive, administrative or professional work, broadly speaking), as laid out on the Department of Labor’s own overtime page. Cooking, serving and cleaning at a buffet restaurant doesn’t fit that duties test, regardless of how the paycheck is structured.
That’s the trap this case illustrates: an employer can call a payment a “salary” and set it monthly instead of hourly, but if the underlying job doesn’t meet both the pay-level and duties requirements, the worker is still owed overtime for every hour over 40.
Minimum Wage and Missing Records Made It Worse
The Department of Labor also found that Miyako Japanese Buffet failed to pay minimum wage for all hours actually worked in some pay periods and did not keep the time and pay records employers are legally required to maintain. Recordkeeping isn’t a paperwork technicality — it’s the evidence trail that lets a worker or an investigator reconstruct what someone actually earned versus what they were owed. The Department of Labor’s recordkeeping requirements call for accurate records of hours worked and wages paid for nonexempt employees, and its minimum wage guidance makes clear that every hour worked has to be paid at or above the federal floor, currently $7.25 an hour, regardless of how a business structures its payroll.
When both protections fail at once — no real overtime and no reliable records — workers are left with no paper trail of their own to point to, which is exactly why federal investigators, not just individual employees, end up doing the math.
What to Check on Your Own Pay Stub
If you’re paid a flat amount regardless of your hours, and your job involves the kind of hands-on work this restaurant’s staff did — cooking, serving, cleaning, running a register — that flat pay is worth a second look. Track your actual hours for a few weeks alongside what you’re paid, ideally with your own notes and not just what a schedule says you were assigned. If you’re regularly working more than 40 hours and your check never changes, or if slow weeks and busy weeks pay exactly the same, you may be owed money under the same rules that applied here.
You don’t need a lawyer to start that process. You can file a complaint with the Wage and Hour Division directly, and by law your employer cannot fire you, cut your hours or otherwise retaliate against you for asking about your pay or filing a claim — that protection exists specifically so workers don’t have to choose between a paycheck and reporting wage theft. The $732,976 recovered from this one restaurant shows the number can be real and it can be significant, covering months or years of unpaid overtime for people who had no reason to think their steady “salary” was actually shorting them — but only when someone checks the math.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
More Financial Reading
