How Screwing Your Workers Gets You Rated as Top 100 Places to Work

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http://www.alternet.org/investigations/one-company-really-shouldnt-be-list-top-100-companies-work



Fortune magazine loves rankings: the richest businesses, top business celebrities, 50 most powerful women, and so on. But one thing you won’t find in Fortune's 2013 list of the “100 Best Companies To Work For” is that number 65, Darden Restaurants—owner of the nation’s biggest sit-down dining chains with 2,000 restaurants—is being sued in a class action in federal court for wage theft and nearly 20,000 servers and bartenders have signed on.

That’s not the only big suit Darden faces for underpaying servers—the legal complaint states. Darden also didn't let employees punch the clock when they start working, assigned them to do set-up tasks without pay, and failed to share tips. Another similar wage theft class action suit, filed in New York in 2011, has been joined by 500 workers.

Yet in each year that this embarassing litigation unfolded—2011, 2012, 2013—Fortune repeatedly put Darden on its 100 best workplace list. Darden ranked 97th in 2011, 99th in 2012, and 65th in 2013. “What makes it so great?” the magazine’s most recent listing asks. “The parent of Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and six other restaurant chains employs 135,000 part-timers, who are eligible for low-cost health insurance.”

Now, beyond the fact that Darden’s critics have documented that many part-time workers cannot afford the benefit that Fortune cites because of low pay, and Darden doesn’t offer hourly employees earned paid sick days, there is something even more eyebrow-raising about its Fortune “Best Company” trophy: Darden essentially has been buying it and then bragging about it.