Dunkin Franchisee Owes $1.5 Million for Flouting NYC Scheduling Law in Queens, Manhattan

New York City’s $1.5m settlement with a Dunkin Donuts franchisee over “fair workweek” violations hints at deeper tensions in low-wage employment and the city’s regulatory ambitions.

In a city where the minimum wage can feel like the upper limit for hundreds of thousands, the promise of reliable scheduling often proves hollow. Last week, New York’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) extracted a $1.5m settlement from Salz Management LLC, operator of 24 Dunkin Donuts and Taco Bell outlets, for systematically short-changing employees on their right to predictable work hours. The payout, among the largest under the city’s Fair Workweek Law, also ropes in $155,000 in civil penalties on top of restitution for 760 workers—small change for a corporation, but a not-so-paltry sum for low-wage staff denied both certainty and compliance.

The two-year DCWP investigation found that Salz’s practices were neither accidental nor isolated. Investigators uncovered abrupt schedule changes, failure to provide two weeks’ advance notice, and the imposition of “clopening” shifts—where the unfortunate barista or cashier closes shop at midnight only to greet dawn’s first caffeine addicts a few hours later—without legally-required consent or extra pay. Schedules materialised at the last minute. When new shifts opened, insiders were often overlooked, as the franchisee hired external candidates without offering current employees a crack at additional hours.

The enforcement is not unique. In tandem with the Dunkin Donuts settlement, DCWP reached another agreement with Theory, an upscale fashion retailer, netting $277,000 for 60 workers over similar scheduling misadventures. The agency has signalled that more investigations, and likely more such settlements, are to come.

As a plain legal matter, the city’s Fair Workweek Law—introduced in 2017—mandates that fast-food and retail employers furnish workers with 14 days’ notice of schedules, compensate for last-minute changes, and offer new shifts to existing employees first. These rules, as the city’s more energetic attorneys will tell employers, are not optional. That Salz Management, with a sprawling portfolio that stretches from Baskin Robbins to Wendy’s, ignored these requirements across two dozen stores for years, suggests that regulatory compliance remains aspirational in some quarters of the food service world.

What do such settlements portend for the city’s economic landscape? For New York’s army of service workers—especially those supporting families on threadbare wages—the settlement is more than a rebuke to one employer. Predictable schedules are not just a matter of fairness, but a logistical necessity for those balancing second jobs, childcare, or study. The restitution payouts, though individually modest, at least recognise the value of time lost and arrangements upended.

On the employer side, the calculus is unsurprisingly mixed. New York’s food and retail franchisees, already sweating rising input costs and a fussy post-pandemic customer base, rail against regulatory “overreach” and heavier compliance burdens. While the sums involved here are survivable for a multi-brand operator, the reputational blow is harder to price. Yet for those keeping a keener eye on their rotas and rulebooks, the risk calculus has just shifted.

The city, for its part, has been eager to paint these settlements as signals of renewed resolve. Sam Levine, the DCWP’s commissioner, has been forthright that “ignoring our worker protection laws is not an option”—a position at odds with perceptions, particularly in immigrant-heavy and lower-income boroughs, that unscrupulous bosses operate with impunity. The hope, presumably, is that headline fines goad franchisees toward compliance rather than simply budgeting a small fraction of annual turnover as “settlement risk.”

Striking a balance between predictability and flexibility

The implications reach beyond economics into the social contract. New York thrives on flexible, adaptable labour—yet flexibility, prized by employers, looks like precarity to employees who cannot reliably plan their lives. The Fair Workweek Law, an early foray in American attempts to tame erratic scheduling, seeks to restore some bargaining power to the bottom rung. One could argue that such laws only nudge management toward efficiency: after all, constant churn, comically last-minute scheduling, and frayed employee morale do little to advance a company’s bottom line.

Nationally, New York is not alone in trying to rout scheduling abuses. Cities from Seattle to San Francisco have adopted their own “predictive scheduling” statutes, though enforcement varies. Early studies suggest the measures have improved workers’ satisfaction without imposing the dire economic costs predicted by industry lobbyists. Still, unionisation rates in food service remain puny, and the balance of power firmly tilts toward employers—all the more so amid fears of automation or offshoring.

In the global context, New York’s rules appear almost restrained. Compared to Western Europe’s robust worker protections, America’s fair workweek rules are toothy only by national standards, not international ones. In Germany and France, employees routinely expect weeks’ notice and legal recourse for sudden shift changes; sanctions for compliance failures, while not always draconian, are at least predictable enough to incentivise good behaviour.

Yet one must resist naive optimism. Even the most energetic enforcement cannot excise the incentives for employers to prioritise flexibility, particularly in a city with dynamic demand and thinning margins. In the medium term, we judge that high-profile settlements such as these may tilt employer practice, but only incrementally. The equilibrium—between “just-in-time” employment beloved by managers and the routine predictability valued by the workforce—remains uneasy.

Ultimately, New York’s latest settlement is neither a panacea nor a harbinger of regulatory overreach. Rather, it gestures towards a fragile progress: compensating a few, chastening some, nudging an industry. As long as coffee (or fast fashion) calls at odd hours, city agencies and the businesses they police will continue to circle each other—sometimes adversarially, sometimes, if grudgingly, in shared pursuit of a fairer deal for those who keep the city ticking. ■