When Khadengra Subedi immigrated to the U.S., he said, the first job he was offered was at a Subway sandwich shop in San Francisco. Subedi, a Nepali father of two, needed to stand on his own two feet, so he took the job.
In the nine months he worked there last year, he said, he never received a paycheck. Instead, he was paid $14 an hour in cash, and some months those payments didn’t arrive on time. He said that because he was running the restaurant by himself for much of his 10-hour workdays, he often couldn’t take breaks, even to use the bathroom.
“I’m in the U.S. for the first time,” he told NBC News. “I didn’t know anything about minimum wage, overtime, sick pay. … I came here with my family. I have to do every job.”
Now the California Labor Commissioner’s Office is investigating the franchise where he worked and six other Subways under the same ownership over allegations of various labor law violations against their mostly immigrant workers, many of whom say they were paid well below San Francisco’s minimum wage of $18.67 an hour — or not at all.
Fast food and service jobs are a regular part of life for new immigrants in the US, especially for those who do not speak fluent English.
Previous lawsuits and investigations have revealed what advocates say is a pattern of mistreatment of immigrant workers at Subway locations across the country.
Their plight came to light last year when one of the workers approached representatives of Trabajadores Unidos Workers United, a San Francisco-based union that has partnered with the nonprofit Legal Aid at Work, a group that provides free legal services to workers. So far, 10 workers have come forward, they said, and based on their reports, the group estimates that 25 have been affected in the past three years.
The seven Subway restaurants, all in San Francisco, are owned by a single husband and wife team: Christopher Van Buren and Marta Gebreslasie. They run two businesses that jointly own the seven franchises.
Representatives of Trabajadores Unidos and Legal Aid at Work say the vast majority of workers hired by the two were and are immigrants. Some workers were paid below the minimum wage and received cash payments in envelopes, according to the original complaint filed by the two organizations.
NBC News reviewed photos of Subedi’s envelopes, which he kept, and compared the dollar amounts on them to the corresponding hours on his time cards. Others who were paid minimum wage during their regular hours were not paid overtime, according to advocates who compared their pay stubs and time cards.
Trabajadores Unidos and Legal Aid at Work filed the complaint, and in May the couple received a notice from the California Labor Commissioner’s Office, viewed by NBC News, asking them to stop the illegal labor practices. Their wage violations included three counts: paying less than California’s $16-an-hour minimum wage, paying less than the city of San Francisco’s $18.67-an-hour minimum wage, and paying less than the state’s new $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast-food workers, which went into effect in April.
Attorneys for the two organizations say it is unclear whether any changes have actually been made since they received the notices. The Office of the Labor Commissioner says its investigation is ongoing.
“We take these matters very seriously and are investigating the alleged claims,” a spokesperson for Subway’s corporate office said. “Our restaurants are independently owned and operated, and franchisees must comply with federal, state and local laws.”
Van Buren and Gebreslasie had a franchise manager who former employees identified as a woman named Shila Acharya Thapa. Employees say they feel, based on her hiring practices, that Thapa wanted to hire new immigrants who struggled with English.
“The manager wants to hire as many Nepalese and Burmese people as possible,” said Subedi.
“They don’t understand English, don’t know the minimum wage, don’t know overtime and don’t know sick leave, just like me.”
Thapa did not respond to phone calls or text messages seeking comment. Van Buren and Gebreslasie did not respond to requests for comment left on their personal phone numbers or through their lawyers.
Both Subedi and another former employee, Monica Ramirez, 50, who worked at another location for two months in 2019, said Thapa was the person they interacted with the most. Subedi said Thapa told him to lie when someone asked him how much he made and say it was minimum wage. Ramirez said she caught Thapa editing her timesheet multiple times to say she had clocked out earlier than she had.
“There were no breaks,” Ramirez said in an interview translated from Spanish. “I just kept working until closing time.”
Subedi said that, living on an hourly wage of $14 for nine months, he struggled to pay his bills and provide for his children. He had to borrow money from friends to survive, he said.
“San Francisco is so expensive,” he said. “I’m the only one in my family who works. … It was hard at the time.”
One month, Ramirez said, she didn’t get paid at all. When she confronted the owners and manager about it, she was met with aggression and yelling, she said. And in the time it took her to find another job, she said, she missed her rent payment.
“I have asked [the owner] Marta, ‘If you pay me on time, I’ll stay,’ Ramirez said. ‘She just looked down. She didn’t say yes. … So I decided to quit.’
Although it has been a few years since she worked there, she still has not received her wages for nine days of work.
Both Subedi and Ramirez have found better jobs with checks that meet minimum wage requirements and offer benefits, overtime and breaks. But advocates say they fear for those still working at the franchises and the thousands of others across the country.
Previous cases of exploitation at Subways
According to the chain’s website, there are 20,605 Subway locations in the U.S. And some estimates say that 30% to 50% of them are owned by immigrants. Subway has faced controversy in the past, not only because franchise owners exploit immigrant workers, but also because of the problems faced by immigrant owners themselves.
In a 2021 lawsuit, the restaurant chain was accused of exploiting Asian immigrants, encouraging them to open franchises and then piling unnecessary fees on them, causing the businesses to fail. The case was voluntarily dismissed.
A Subway spokeswoman told the New York Post at the time that the company “is proud of its diverse franchise network, many of which are small- and minority-owned businesses.”
An investigation last year by the U.S. Department of Labor into a series of Bay Area Subway franchises found that owners hired workers as young as 14 and 15 to work long hours and operate dangerous equipment. Owners also withheld tips and failed to pay workers a regular wage, it found.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has ordered the owners to pay nearly $1 million in back wages.
A lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission this year accused the owners of a Seattle Subway franchise of creating a hostile work environment for black employees and instructing a manager not to hire black workers. The franchise owners eventually agreed to pay $25,000 to settle the lawsuit.
“It’s no coincidence that this happens over and over again with Subway restaurants and other fast food companies,” said Alexx Campbell, an attorney with Legal Aid at Work who advocates for San Francisco’s workers. “The whole model is set up to incentivize smaller franchises to cut costs as much as possible to squeeze every penny out of their workforce.”
Miriam Medellin Myers, an organizer with Trabajadores Unidos, says she sees this pattern of abuse against recently hired workers in other sectors as well.
“Part of it is just this culture of fear, where people feel like they can’t speak up because if they speak up, they’ll lose their job, their home, their livelihood,” she said. “It’s such a traumatic experience to come to a country and not speak the language, and it’s already so expensive to live in the Bay Area. So when someone offers you a job, that’s great, you want to take it.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
