You may recall that last month Laura Clawson posted about a Papa John’s franchisee who was charged with wage theft and required to pay a settlement of $500,000. He also faced up to 60 days in jail for failing to pay overtime through a scheme in which he created fictitious employees and used those names to pay employees straight time after they worked 40 hours.
Well, guess what happened? The franchisee, Abdul Jamil Khokhar, actually was sentenced to 60 days in jail. That’s the good news.
As for the bad news…
Search for this story on the Web and you will see a sorry state of affairs indeed. I’ve read about it on several sites and many of the comments are entirely racist in nature. Examples:
Probably sent the money to ISIS
This guy wouldn't happen to have been a refugee also, was he ?
Abdul Jamil Khokhar? GUILTY! You know who he was cheering for in Paris. Lousy camel jockey should also be put on a no fly list
And these are just from the mainstream/local news sites — go to foxnews.com (no, don’t actually) and it’s worse.
I'm sure that if the guy had been named Smith or Johnson, many of those same people would be posting about how this poor small business owner is being harassed by big government through unnecessary regulation, when we should just leave him alone to create jobs.
Two things I haven’t been able to find out:
1) Whether his fictitious employee scheme is going to get him in trouble with the IRS.
2) What the public response is from Papa John himself, or the company. Given Schnatter’s previous positions on employee relations, it will probably be similar to the statements above.