By Amy Zimmer
DNAinfo News Editor
UPPER EAST SIDE — A group of protesters has been picketing outside an Upper East Side Domino's Pizza franchise every Monday since September.
They hand out flyers with the heading "Domino's Pizza: America's Fast-Food Sweatshop" in front of the Third Avenue and East 89th Street shop. The group is claiming in a class-action lawsuit that owner David Melton violates federal and state labor laws by cheating workers out of minimum wage and overtime pay.
But Melton — who runs other Domino's Pizza operations at First Avenue at 74th Street, Third Avenue and East 32nd Street and Columbus Avenue at 89th Street — has created a dueling flyer of his own to "address the false accusations."
It tells the story of how he and his wife, in business for more than 20 years, helped seven of their former delivery workers open up their own Domino's shops and have one of the lowest turnover rates of any Domino's franchise.
Melton is the author of "Hire the American Dream: How to build your minimum wage workforce into a high-performance, customer-focused team."
The 10 workers who have so far joined the suit would claim they've been left out of that dream.
"I was hired to work as a delivery man," Carlos Rodriguez, 26, who was employed at the Third Avenue and 89th Street location from 2005 until 2007, said through a translator. "But they made me do a lot of other things: clean the windows and floors, chop vegetables, cut pizza, pack deliveries."
His former colleague, Aboubacar Gouen, 30, chimed in, saying they also fixed bathroom leaks, repaired their delivery bikes at their own expense, bought their own uniforms and picked up managers' uniforms from the dry cleaners.
"When I came here, I started at $4.60 an hour. That's [the wage] for tipped employees, but we do everything," Gouen said. "We do work that's not tipped."
They both said they worked 60 hours a week but only got paid for 40–45 hours. They put in the extra time, Gouen said, because of the tips, even if that was skirting wage laws.
Their lawsuit is seeking unpaid wages along with compensatory damages for having been fired or having their hours cut in retaliation for complaining about work conditions, which is what Rodriguez claimed happened to him.
"What they put into their flyer isn't right, isn't accurate," said David Melton, who included his and his wife's cell phone on his flyer, saying "we're not hiding anything."
"I've helped people become franchisees. I've helped people become citizens. This whole thing has been a horrible experience," Melton said. "I have run a respected, legitimate business and paid people the way they're supposed to be paid. I'm sure you can go into 1,000 other businesses around here and find things that are much worse. It's very frustrating."
Rodriguez said he joined the campaign against Domino's, which is being organized by the advocacy group National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, after hearing about their work fighting the owners of the Saigon Grill restaurants on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side and on University Place in Greenwich Village.
After nearly two years battling with Saigon Grill, 36 delivery workers won a judgment of $4.6 million for labor law violations.
