St. Pete hotel owner pays workers’ back wages

Thirty workers at five St. Petersburg hotels will get extra compensation following a U.S. Department of Labor investigation.

The department’s Wage and Hour Division found that the owner of the five hotels, Michael Andoniades, violated overtime and recordkeeping provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act, according to a news release. He paid $23,368 in back pay and liquidated damages to the 30 workers, the news release said.

Andoniades did not respond to a message from the St. Pete Catalyst asking for comment.

The hotels involved in the investigation are:

• Hollander Hotel, 421 4th Ave. N.
• Avalon Hotel LLC, 443 4th Ave. N.
• Bay Plaza Hotel, 419 3rd Ave. N.
• Mari Jean Hotel LLC, 2349 Central Ave.
• Lenox Hotel LLC, 325 6th Ave. N.

The Hollander and the Avalon hotels share employees. When the employees worked at both hotels in the same workweek, the employers failed to combine those hours when determining whether overtime was due, federal investigators found. Instead, the workers were paid separately for hours worked at each location at straight time, not overtime, pay — even when the total hours worked was more than 40.

“Owners at establishments that share employees do not have the right to treat each establishment as separate from the others when determining an employee’s total hours and the wages that worker is rightfully due,”  James Schmidt, district director of the  Wage and Hour in Tampa, said in the news release.

Investigators also found that the employers incorrectly classified one salaried maintenance employee as exempt from overtime requirements and subsequently failed to pay the worker overtime for hours worked beyond 40 in a work week.