Lawsuit: Subway Boss Invented Ghost Employees To Avoid Overtime Pay

A Subway sandwich shop franchisee is being sued by a former employee who claims he was regularly shorted on his check by way of a scheme whereby he was paid for hours worked in excess of 40 with a second check, written to the name of a fictional employee (“Ever Ventura”). The suit was filed for a proposed class of about a dozen employees of the same Subway shop, all of whom were alleged to have been shorted by the same method, in some cases over a period of about two years. The plaintiff also alleges he was paid less than minimum wage and not paid at all for a 45-hour period shortly before he left the job. The franchiser was not named as a defendant. Writer Dave Jamieson, in his article about the lawsuit in HuffPost Business, notes that splitting checks to circumvent overtime rules is not unheard of: In June restaurant workers at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC said they were shorted by a similar scheme, in a complaint filed with the Department of Labor.