Massachusetts Attorney General and 2014 Governor candidate Martha Coakley has reached a settlement with a Massachusetts-based International House of Pancakes, known colloquially as IHOP, in which the restaurant and its owner will pay $100,000 in penalties for various wage violations.

“Workers deserve to be paid all of their wages, including tips,” AG Coakley said in a statement on Friday. “Restaurant employees should not have to front the business costs of the restaurant out of their pay.”

As if IHOP interiors weren’t unkempt enough, the sleazy actions by the location’s owner, RME Enterprises, and its president and treasurer Robert Max Evans certainly add to its aura of homeliness. One complaint alleges that an employee was fired on the spot for resisting to pay out of her tips for the full bill of a customer who left without paying.

In Massachusetts, tipped wage employees, like those who work in the restaurant industry, make a base rate of $2.63 per hour. That compensation hasn’t been changed since 1999. More concerning for them is that since 1968, the inflation-adjusted value of the tipped minimum wage has fallen 58 percent.

Related:

Other complaints filed against the IHOP, of which a press release from the AG’s office notes “174 workers will receive individual amounts ranging from about $40 to more than $1,700, depending upon their length of service,” are as follows:

• Wait staff were required to share their tips with non-wait staff;
• Employees were required to pay from their wages the full meal costs of any meals for which a mistake was alleged to have been made;
• Employees were required to pay from their wages for “breakages” of dishware, the amount of which was determined by the employer based on dish type;
• Employees were subject to meal deductions from their wages when no meals were eaten, consent was not given generally, and at times when consent was specifically and affirmatively withheld;
• Employees’ work time, and thus wages, were “shaved” to account for alleged meal break time, when meal breaks were not taken generally and at times when employees specifically and affirmatively noted they took no break

In some form or another, all of the violations breach the Massachusetts Minimum Fair Wage Law, the Wage Act, the Tips Law, and the Anti-Retaliation Law.

Coakley, running for Governor as a Democrat, made an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate back in 2010 after losing to Republican Scott Brown. Though she’s notable in the early stages of the race for having severely mismanaged campaign funds and violated protocol, she has U.S. Senator from Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren in her support corner, a popular champion for the left-wing so admired that, after only one year in the upper house of the bicameral legislature, her name has been tossed around in the scrum to take presidential election of 2016 – a prospect she’s vehemently denied.

More information about the state’s wage and hour laws is also available in multiple languages at the AG’s Workplace Rights website.