Trevor Harris was the general manager of a Boston Market in suburban Philadelphia. He left last October for what he called a “marginal opportunity” after seeing mounting problems with the company he’d worked with for the past decade.
And then in January he began getting medical bills. Harris was billed for prescription drugs, doctor visits and medical procedures, all of which he thought were covered in 2023 by Boston Market’s health insurance plan.
Except that plan was quietly canceled companywide last June, due to unpaid premiums. Nobody said anything to the workers, according to Harris and several other former employees. “I paid money into these benefits that I don’t have,” he said. “And I have claims that have never been taken care of. What am I supposed to do?”
That’s not the only problem Harris and other employees have faced in the weeks or months since they left Boston Market.
More than a dozen former employees, most of whom count their tenure with the brand in decades, say they’ve had problems accessing the most basic benefits in the aftermath. They aren’t getting their W-2 forms, requiring complicated workarounds that often necessitate hiring an accountant.
Social Security shows no record of them making an income in either 2022 or 2023, according to employees and records shared with Restaurant Business. Some workers say they can’t get unemployment benefits because of the lack of income records.
The problems highlight the lingering effects of Boston Market’s downfall, which has resulted in the closure of about 90% of the fast-casual chain’s restaurants since the beginning of 2023 amid a mountain of lawsuits over unpaid bills.
“I was owed two paychecks. I wasn’t working for free.” -Donna Augustine-Berry
The downfall
Boston Market has been sued more than 150 times since 2020, when former Pizza Hut franchisee Jay Pandya acquired the chain from longtime owner Sun Capital. Most of the lawsuits are over unpaid bills.
The biggest lawsuit came from broadline distributor US Foods, which won a $15 million default judgment against Boston Market in February over unpaid bills, a judgment Boston Market is appealing.
Employees last year ended up buying items from Costco, Restaurant Depot or other retailers to supply enough food for the restaurants. “Thank god I still remembered a lot of the old recipes,” said Donna Augustine-Berry, who ran a location in Brandon, Fla., before she left in October.
That didn’t keep customers from getting angry once they realized the food was different, like the mashed potatoes. Restaurants shifted to instant potato flakes last year. “The abuse we were taking from the public, it was horrible,” Augustine-Berry said, noting that some customers cursed at her. Others threw macaroni and cheese and chicken. “A couple of times I had to call the police.”
Augustine-Berry started working with Boston Market in New Jersey in 1994. She later moved to Florida and ran some restaurants there as a regional area manager. She stuck through several ownership changes, steady store closures and the pandemic.
She planned to retire in two years, when she turned 64. But last year, after working without pay, she left the company in October.
“I was owed two paychecks,” Augustine-Berry said. “I wasn’t working for free.”
She estimates that Boston Market owes her $10,000 in unpaid wages and vacation.
Boston Market has closed most of its locations since the start of 2023. | Photo by Lisa Jennings.
Complexities
Restaurant Business sent Pandya a detailed list of questions, both via email and text, and repeatedly asked him to answer. He never answered those questions.
Pandya did take issue with RB’s earlier report that the chain is down to 27 units, saying there’s “more than double” that number. Our reporting came from a list of open locations provided to Restaurant Business, along with interviews with numerous employees. When we asked Pandya for a list of open locations, he refused to provide one.
Under Pandya, Boston Market is a complex tangle of LLCs filed in different states.
For instance, at least 37 different LLCs for “Boston Market” or “Boston Chicken” have been created in Pennsylvania since 2020. The LLCs typically cover different states or areas of the country, such as “Boston Chicken of AZ” or “Boston Chicken of Ill.”
The complex organization has made it difficult to nail the company down on a large scale. It’s also contributing to the difficulty former employees say they’re having in getting legal assistance.
Employees who left their jobs after not receiving paychecks said legal costs to fight the company and get what they’re owed would cost more than the amount they’re owed—with no guarantee of payment at the end.
Unemployment insurance
Che White started working with Boston Market a decade ago and was the area manager for Georgia and North Carolina.
He said reimbursement for mileage, hotels and other expenses related to his travel came in slowly early last year and ultimately stopped. By the time White left the company in July, he said he was owed three months’ worth of expenses and one paycheck. He estimates the company owes him more than $10,000.
In an email sent to Pandya and other company officials in September, White offered to take half that. He didn’t get a response.
He went to a private attorney and was told a legal fight would take years and would cost more than what he was owed.
But White also filed to get unemployment benefits and was repeatedly denied because there’s no proof that he worked for the chain. “There was no record of them paying taxes,” he said. He made a half-dozen visits to the unemployment office.
“There were a lot of hoops to go through,” White said. “By the time all that happened, I just decided it’s not worth it to keep going down there, being denied or prolonging everything. So I just emptied out my savings to cover all my daily expenses.”
“My doctor called me and said, ‘Your insurance was canceled.” -Donna Augustine-Berry
Social Security, benefits and W-2s
Some employees said they’ve received their earnings records from the Social Security Administration, only to see no income reported in 2022 and 2023.
Augustine-Berry, for instance, produced a copy of her earnings record from the administration, showing a “not yet recorded” from 2022, rather than how much she earned that year.
She also provided a notification from MetLife, Boston Market’s dental insurance provider, saying that coverage was canceled. “Because Boston Market has failed to fund the account from which dental benefits can be paid, MetLife can no longer process claims payments on behalf of Boston Market,” the letter said.
Employees said health insurance was canceled at the end of June, but many employees didn’t find out until they went to the doctor. “My doctor called me and said, ‘Your insurance was canceled,” Augustine-Berry said.
Numerous employees we spoke with said they are having problems filing taxes because they can’t get their W-2s.
Boston Market used Paycor to handle payroll, but then switched to another company, Dayforce. Employees said they can’t access their W-2 documents from either company so they can file their taxes.
“None of us got W-2s,” former General Manager Mohammed Saleem said.
That has many of them working furiously with the IRS to find ways to get taxes filed, while some are hiring accountants to help navigate the problem. Making things more challenging for workers is that some of their paychecks were handwritten and didn’t come with pay stubs. At points, some workers were paid through the mobile app Zelle.
That’s made it difficult for many to estimate taxes so they can file and pay something. And employees, desperate to get some kind of help, are contacting their former bosses.
“Employees are calling you, but your arms are tied and you can’t do anything,” said John Brooks, who worked with Boston Market from 1996 until last year.
“People couldn’t pay their bills, couldn’t buy groceries. They were getting eviction notices.” -Mohammed Saleem
Ending their careers
Many of the employees we spoke with have worked for the brand for decades and planned to retire with Boston Market.
Saleem spent 24 years with the chain and ran a restaurant in Fairfax, Va. Last year was difficult, as employees weren’t being paid and he bought food from Restaurant Depot to keep the store open. He sometimes gave employees money when they weren’t paid after a while.
“They didn’t have money to come to work,” Saleem said. “They were living paycheck to paycheck.”
Last November, he got to his restaurant to find the locks changed, ending his career there. “It was mental torture,” he said of his last three months at the company. “People couldn’t pay their bills, couldn’t buy groceries. They were getting eviction notices.”
John Brooks spent nearly 30 years with the company and ran a store in Mount Kisco, N.Y. He and many of the restaurant’s employees had worked there for years. “A lot of people thought we owned the place,” he said. “We worked hard. We took care of our customers and we knew most of the customers.
“When these guys showed up, they didn’t fix the lights, the refrigeration, the air conditioning, the heating. They switched from real mashed potatoes to instant mashed potatoes. It made us look like the ones who were not doing our jobs.”
He left last year, saying the condition of the company was upsetting. “It was a good company,” he said. “But they did everything they could to make it not a good company.”
Similarly, Susan Davis was a general manager of a Boston Market in New York. She worked there for 17 years and, like Brooks, left because people were being paid late and she had to get food from retailers.
But even through those issues, it was tough to leave. “You spend that much time in an organization, it’s hard to start over,” Davis said. “On the day I left, I sat in the store and cried.”
Today, however, she happily works with a Chick-fil-A.
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