An Illinois woman sued a local Applebee’s restaurant for reportedly serving her a meal that had glass in it.
The Madison Record reported that Linda Harbaugh was at the restaurant on August 30, 2014, when she injured her tongue and digestive tract after ingesting pieces of glass that were in her shrimp scampi.
The lawsuit that Harbaugh filed claimed that she was hit with significant medical expenses as a result of her injuries, and alleged that Applebee’s failed to observe the broken glass that was in the food. The lawsuit is seeking upwards of $50,000 in damages plus the costs of legal action.
In a similar incident, a North Carolina woman sued the Hickory Tavern restaurant chain for allegedly cheating her and hundreds of other workers out of minimum wage work.
The restaurant was accused in Vanessa Chavez’s suit of violating federal law regarding tipping employees. Fair labor rules allow restaurants to pay servers reduced rates on the condition that tips cover the difference between the rate and the federal minimum wage.
Chavez claimed in her lawsuit that she and other workers were required to spend time doing non-tipped work that should have paid the minimum wage. Instead, the restaurant paid the reduced rate of $2.13 for the additional work.
“I just thought it wasn’t right for them to take advantage of these servers,” she told the Charlotte Observer. “A lot of them are young and a lot of them did not know (the law).”
Chavez said she was told to clean tables that were assigned to other servers, meaning that she wouldn’t collect the tips that were associated with that table. The young woman, who had experience at other restaurants working as a server, said that the pay practices at Hickory Tavern were questionable from the start.
“It’s a very stressful job,” she said. “It is even more stressful when you are being cheated out of money.”
