Shipley Do-Nuts Facing Legal Trouble Over Alleged Unpaid Overtime (Plus There Are Sexual Harassment Claims)

Four former Houston-area Shipley Do-Nuts employees are trying to get a class-action lawsuit off the ground against the bakery, reports Houston Chronicle.

The former employees allege that Shipley refused to pay their due overtime. The suit claims that all the workers filing the suit regularly “worked over forty hours a week,” and that the company should have known as much, and compensated them accordingly.

These employees weren’t slinging donuts. Rather, they were working at the Shipley warehouse as well as the North Main Street corporate office, performing warehouse work, housekeeping or clerical tasks, respectively.

Among other things, the suit alleges that one warehouse worker was paid for a 40-hour week no matter how much time he put in (which is claimed to be sometimes 60 hours.) A housekeeper who is part of the suit says she was expected to drive her own car to clean other properties owned by Shipley, without appropriate compensation (or overtime pay to boost to her $9/hour wage.)

Shipley released a statement to counter the claims, calling them “unfounded,” “completely without merit” and “no more than a retaliation ... for their recent termination.”

Click2Houston, also reporting on the lawsuit, brings up another charge against Shipley: sexual harassment. A former employee described incidents of tight hugging and inappropriate touching to the website.

This isn’t Shipley’s first brush-up with the law — though when the store was robbed back in October 2016, the shop was on the other side. When the robbery occurred, Shipley owner Raymond Hout says he was hit with a money box by one of the men, at which point he began physically retaliating. Hout was also able to detain one of the alleged robbers until police arrived.