Autistic restaurant worker goes unpaid for a year

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http://wpri.com/2015/10/20/autistic-res ... or-a-year/

Conveniently ignored in the article is how Applebee's HR & the restaurant manager knew he was working and knew they weren't cutting a check every two weeks. They have budgets. Work schedules. And the two are tied together. Yet the restaurant is playing it as if they had no idea and of *course* are cutting a check now, because they would never do anything wrong...

You'd also think such a thing would be against the law, regardless of whether an intermediate job assistance agency is involved.

I think Applebee's upper echelon ought to give those managers at that particular restaurant their walking papers, if just for keeping up good public relations.

Yeh sure, and up until then it was probably something along the lines of "let's see how long we can screw this ret*d out of his earnings".

To be fair, given that Caleb wasn't clocking in, it's entirely possible that Applebee's HR, sitting in an office possibly thousands of miles away from this restaurant, knew nothing about this beyond "We hired this kid but from what we can tell with the data available to us, he's never even showed up for work."

Furthermore, in light of my own experience with the human services industry in Rhode Island, it seems to me eminently fair to place at least as much blame on RHD's negligence as on the restaurant manager's greed.

Reminds me of what they decided to do to Milton in Office Space.

Now that they got caught they will pay him. If they had paid him way below minimum wage it would haven been perfectly legal.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/22/applebee-s-stiffs-autistic-employee-and-they-re-hardly-alone.html

Sounds like there was a lack of communication between the state and Appleby's. We shouldn't jump to conclusions about this and accuse the restaurant of evil-doing when you consider that he was hired on an internship program.
I can easily see where there was confusion; truth to tell, it sounds like the screw-up was at the government level, where some 'civil servant' failed to do their job and follow up on this kid's case.

It wouldn't have been a civil servant who failed to do their job. It would have been an employee of a private agency contracted by the state that failed to do their job. This has long been a huge problem in Rhode Island.

I agree about corporate vs restaurant level. Many large corporations are wise enough to systematically keep a balance sheet of budget vs dollars vs hours (projected vs actual of each) to catch discrepancies, specifically because of lost lawsuits. Perhaps soon Applebee's will join them...?