The celebrity chef and restaurateur Mario Batali and a business partner have agreed to pay $5.25 million to resolve a lawsuit filed on behalf of waiters, captains and other employees who claimed that his restaurants had illegally confiscated part of their tips to supplement their profits, court papers show.
That reminds me of a story I heard recently about a big shot I used to work for at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
When I say I "worked for him," I mean I was a minimum-wage runner for the brokerage firm he owned. It was my first job out of college in the 1980s and I don't think he even knew who I was -- which was just fine with me. The Big Shot was actually a small man -- literally, as well as figuratively -- who was petty and vindictive. (I once saw him fire a co-worker for hanging up on his wife by accident.)
Anyway, the Big Shot sold his firm a few years ago to a large London-based outfit (you'd recognize the name). As often happens in these situations, the new company proceeded to lay off most of the old company's employees. And, as also often happens, they paid these employees a severance, probably one month's pay for each year they worked. Now most of these workers were making less than $30,000 a year and many of them had only been with the firm for a year or two. So, you do the math: in many cases we're talking about severances of only about six or seven thousand dollars -- before taxes. Not a bad payday for many of these people, but a pittance for the Big Shot.
Where is he going with this?, I'm sure you're thinking right about now. Stay with me; it gets interesting. Turns out, the Big Shot -- somehow -- decided he was entitled to half of all these severances. (And this guy is reportedly worth over $100 million!) That is, until someone brought it to the new company's attention. No, you can't take half their severances, he was told.
But can you imagine the chutzpah of a multimillionaire trying to pull something like this? Kind of makes Batali and his partner look like pikers.
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