A federal court has entered default judgments that require the operators of La Puente poultry processing plant to pay more than $1 million after the U.S. Department of Labor found the employers deliberately denied overtime wages earned by 113 workers and tried to hide the wage theft.
In addition to withholding overtime, the employers told some workers to forge timesheets and threatened them if they cooperated with federal investigators. They also created shell companies, hoping to hide overtime violations over a five-year period from 2015 to 2020.