Friday, July 20, 2007

Wendy's employees stiffed out of pay, jobs

My nephew Steve works at Wendy's. At 1:30 this afternoon he called his shift manager, Sidi Dion, to find out when paychecks would be in and was told it wouldn't be till 8 or 9 that night.

At 3:30 my sister drove Steve to work. When they arrived, employees were standing outside, a police cruiser was on the scene, and the store was locked. A few workers from other stores were there, also-- they'd also found their stores locked and dark, and were trying to figure out what was going on.

At 5 tonight Steve reached another shift manager, who had come into the store not knowing, and she told Steve all the food and money was gone.

Obviously,
some people knew what was going down. Of course nobody bothered to tell the workers, and most likely they are out a week's pay.

The franchise for this store and a number of others in Western Massachusetts is owned by
Sondocatt Investments, major stockholder Robert Burda of Ohio. My sister looked the company up online and found out that on July 2, Capmark Finance Inc. filed a civil suit in Federal Court charging Sondocatt Investments and Robert Burda with breach of contract. They are asking for a jury trial.

What exact action led up to the closings, we don't know yet. I called stores in Chicopee, Holyoke, Ludlow, Hadley, Northampton and Westfield, and the phones just rang and rang.

Steve worked for $7.50 an hour-- the state minimum wage. About 70 workers will be without jobs.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

There are tax liens on this " corporation " for non payment of property tax as well as Mass State Meals and sales tax...This " gentleman " has nor honored several promises to pay with local municipalities. I feel bad for the employees who in good faith did their jobs and got screwed...Fight for what is yours..Good luck

Anonymous said...

People are quick to judge when they don't know the whole story. How about those late all nighters that the owner pulled. Cleaning up our store that we didn't keep clean ourselves. He never had anything bad to say to us. Always telling us what a good job we were doing. Then he'd leave and we'd stand around doing nothing. Giving out free food to our friends. Stealing money..yes it happens. Wait up people. When our store was doing well he paid us for holidays we were closed. Management was only suppose to be paid. Did we do our jobs? Are.. are we part of the reason he had financial problems. And who really closed the stores. I heard he wasn't reponsible and tried to keep them open. But it was really Wendys big wigs that didn't care if we got paid and forced him to close. Anyone else out they with even guts to tell the truth?

Anonymous said...

I'm not surprised with no comments on this. No one likes to see themselves for what they are.

Anonymous said...

Interesting about the part of all the food and money being gone. Did Steve happen to mention the fact that it was the employees that took the food, destoryed everything in sight. The cost of all that i'm sure would out weight their paychecks. Nothing in the paper about charges brought againest the guilty employees. I guess thats okay because of how honorable they are.