Papa John's stores to pay $500,000 wage theft settlement

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman keeps cracking down on wage theft, and around 250 workers will be sharing in a nearly $500,000 settlement from four current and former Papa John's franchisees.

"Once again, we’ve found Papa John’s franchises in New York that are ripping off their workers and violating critical state and federal laws,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement. "Once again, I call on Papa John’s and other fast food companies to step up and stop the widespread lawlessness plaguing your businesses and harming the workers who make and deliver your food."

Though it often isn't treated this way, it actually is illegal to fail to pay minimum wage or overtime, to make people work off the clock, to force workers being paid at the tipped worker subminimum wage to do non-tipped work, and a disturbing list of other ways businesses have found to keep money that workers have earned. And about that "once again":

In July, the attorney general's office arrested Abdul Jamil Khokhar, owner of nine Papa John's stores in New York, accusing him of breaking minimum wage and overtime laws. According to his plea agreement, Khokhar could serve up to 60 days in jail. In another case, the attorney general's office secured a judgment of nearly $3 million against two other Papa John's franchisees.

So while the workers were technically employed by—and cheated by—the franchisees, at a certain point you see a pattern and start to think maybe the parent company has something to do with it. That's one of the reasons the National Labor Relations Board pushed to treat some fast food chains as joint employers responsible for working conditions in franchise restaurants.

In 2013, a report from Fast Food Forward found 84 percent of New York City fast food workers reporting that they'd been victims of wage theft. Fully 100 percent of fast food delivery workers said the same. Schneiderman's efforts to crack down have also led to settlements at franchises of other chains, including Domino's and McDonald's.