Dairy Queen is owned by Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world. So why have they let their store in White Center go more than three weeks without paying their employees for their work?
read the full story below, then join the blizzard of messages telling Warren Buffett to make sure the people who work for his company are paid the wages they're owed.
Here's a letter explaining the situation that was sent in by several of the people who have not been paid for their work at Dairy Queen.
"No one has received their checks and more than 20 days have passed."
“One of the employee is homeless with her one year old daughter and is struggling to find a job and is struggling to provide for her family, another employee is behind on their student loans for college, and another person is unable to pay for their car insurance. ”
The Dairy Queen located in 10256 16th Ave SW, Seattle, WA 98146 has not paid their employees for the time they have worked from April 20th to May 5th. No one has received their checks and more than 20 days have passed.
This Dairy Queen was temporarily shut down by corporate on May 7th, 2016. We have tried to come to an understanding with the owner but he has not responded to his employees or made an effort to communicate with them. We weren’t given a notice, we showed up to work only to find out on our own about the store being shut down.
The delay of the checks have affected a lot of the employees. One of the employee is homeless with her one year old daughter and is struggling to find a job and is struggling to provide for her family, another employee is behind on their student loans for college, and another person is unable to pay for their car insurance.
The majority of the employees are unable to pay monthly bills such as phone bills, utility bills, water bill, and rent. Since we did not have the money to pay off these bills, now we owe more because they are overdue and since some of us own credit cards, this is also affecting our credit score.
Some of us can’t help our parents who are struggling with bills. Another employee can’t pay for the select basketball team they were accepted into for AAU. Another employee has to take care of two disabled siblings and without the check she is struggling to provide for them. Some have spent 20+ hours a week working there, while the rest spent more than 40+ a week working.
The employees at this Dairy Queen did a lot to help out the owners even when they didn’t have to. We closed for a few days before the inspection, and some of us came in to work to help out. We repainted cracked and uneven colored walls, we deep cleaned the floors, scrubbed bathrooms, organized food and ice cream and scrubbed walls that were stuck with grease and other filth. We spent a lot of our own time making sure the Dairy Queen we worked for was as best it could be.
The environment at Dairy Queen was extremely tense. We tried our best everyday to make sure our customers were happy but things we couldn't control would always go bad from machines breaking down every 20 minutes or for full days. We also had the owner telling us we couldn't order certain things which were necessary to complete our customers orders and we were left to deal with unhappy customers causing a chain of reactions which led to an unhappy owner yelling at us our firing people because they had the courage to stand up for themselves and say this is enough.
We worked in extremely high heat in the kitchen only having two 6inx6in Walmart fans. We dealt with a rude owner not caring if we were the people who kept his "FastFood" going. We worked overtime without being paid just so we could help our fellow workers so they didn't end up struggling.
The owner required at least 3 people working in the morning and in the evening. This didn't work because there was one person in drive thru, another person in kitchen, and another person in the front. Neither of the people working these stations received help because of the tight schedule we were put on. After shifts change we tried our best to keep smiling while we knew our restaurant was falling apart.
We were the glue to kept everything together and the only reason people didn't quit was because we lived off paycheck to paycheck to survive off $9.47 and constantly accused by the owner that we stole from him. We make minimum and the fact that we can’t even get our pay checks on time is not fair.
The majority of the employees at this Dairy Queen have submitted their electronic signature on this letter:
Lul Weliyo
Tiffany Anderson
Dylan Woodward
Ton Minh Nguyen
Dominique Kirvin
Kayla Russel
Veronica Espinoza
Jordan Jackson
Juan Perez Valenzuela
Alondra Garci
Kayla Russell
Braian Arellano