Photos by Billie Winter If you work in the restaurant industry and your boss shorts your paycheck, you have limited options. You could quit, with or without sending your boss a nasty message, and start looking for a new gig. You could file a complaint with the Washington State Department of Labo r and Industries or Seattle’s Office of Labor Standards, though the investigatory process typically takes months to complete. Or you could file a lawsuit, a choice that may lead you to the cramped, single-room office of Steven Toff.  Toff is the founder of Bread Roses Law Group, a firm that specializes in employment law. He sues employers for discrimination of various kinds, for wage theft, and for denying workers mandatory breaks. Bread Roses has taken on big employers like Boeing, Tesla, Whole Foods, and Thomson Reuters, but after Toff filed a class action lawsuit against the fine-dining restaurant Canlis in 2023, he became a go-to resource for restaurant workers in Seattle.  He’s sued restaurant owners, helped workers file complaints, and assisted employees looking to unionize. To him, it’s all an extension of his prior career as a labor organizer and union advocate; he wants to provide a way for workers in a precarious industry to claw back a few of their rights. Nothing is more “former punk-rock kid” than buttons. Restaurants, he says, are “where you see many of the problems I care most about: low wages, unstable schedules, tip dependency, informal (and often abusive) power structures, retaliation, and workers who often know something is wrong but have very little practical ability to enforce their rights alone.” Anyone who’s ever worked in the service industry has likely run into routine violations of employment law. Toff himself remembers working at a pizzeria as a teenager in Tucson, Arizona. The owner habitually shaved hours off time cards to avoid paying them for work done after closing time; he also cornered a girl in the walk-in fridge to hit on her, Toff recalls. The experience  “informs everything I do as an attorney,” he says. Toff is tall and a bit scruffy for a lawyer, even one in the Pacific Northwest. He has more tattoos sprawling past the sleeves of his quarter-zip than the typical lawyer, too, traces of his time as a globe-trotting union advocate who’s lived in Brazil and Germany. Not that he’s left the bargaining table behind. When employees at Renee Erickson’s critically acclaimed Sea Creatures group unionized last year, Toff agreed to aid contract negotiations for free. (This summer, the union won contracts at the Walrus and the Carpenter and at General Porpoise.) The union, which does not collect dues, would never have been able to afford representation, says United Creatures of the Sea organizer Ford Nickel. “Immediately upon meeting him,” Nickel says, “we realized that, like, this guy is a lawyer, but he is an organizer and supporter of workers and workers’ rights first.” Before Toff was a lawyer or an organizer, he was a “punk-rock kid” from Tucson, getting his first sniff of left-wing politics through bands like Berkeley’s Crimpshrine. He moved to the Bay Area in the ’90s—ostensibly for college but really to play in bands, he says—and was further radicalized by the raw inequality he saw during the height of the dot-com boom. “At the time, I had never seen that kind of homelessness,” he says. “I remember counting the number of people I saw living on the street, on the bus, on the way home.” “He’s very motivated to fight for the little guy.” For Toff, the labor movement provided a way to address this sort of injustice. He majored in labor studies at San Francisco State and, in 2001, organized the Berkeley city recycling plant under the banner of the International Workers of the World. After college, he worked for a number of unions throughout the West, including the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). He organized farm workers in California’s Central Valley, paper mill workers in Oregon, and airline employees in Phoenix, living in hotel rooms and visiting potential union members at home to explain the benefits of unionization. There were long days. And a lot of driving. He became interested in international trade unionism and moved to Berlin for grad school, then wound up working for National Nurses United in New York. In hopes of getting a leadership position at a union, he attended law school at Northeastern University, then served as counsel for the New York State Nurses Association. During the pandemic, he and his family moved to Amsterdam to work for an international labor organization. They moved across the world again when his then-wife got a job in Seattle, a city Toff didn’t know at all. When he arrived, Toff switched to private practice to normalize his working hours and spend more time with his kids. He began volunteering with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a Democratic Socialists of America–sponsored project that supports electrical workers in difficult-to-organize workplaces with tiny workforces and high turnover. Unionizing tends to be a long and complicated process: Workers have to decide among themselves that they want to form a union—often by signing cards—then hold an election, then be formally recognized by management, then negotiate with management on a contract that will govern the new conditions of work. The entire process can drag on for years, especially if an employer stalls and fights the union at every step. As an example of how difficult this journey is, hundreds of Starbucks coffee shops have voted to unionize since 2021, but not a single one has completed a contract. These long timelines are partly why restaurant work is largely non-union—with so much staff turnover, organizing is borderline impossible, and the restaurant in question may close by the time a contract is signed.  Some of the electrical workers Toff talked to through the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee were in similar straits; unionizing wasn’t really a viable way to address grievances with their bosses. But if their bosses were breaking the law, they didn’t need a union. They could sue. “Steven sees angles and opportunities that a lot of people might not see, because he has such an open and creative mind,” says Carol Igoe, a labor advocate and lawyer who has known Toff for two decades and works with him at Bread s.  The angle he saw in the electrical workers’ case was that in Washington State, nearly every employment law statute has “fee-shifting provisions.” That means that if a worker sues their employer and wins, the employer is on the hook for their legal bill. This is what makes Bread Roses’ business model possible.  Toff mostly works on contingency, meaning his clients don’t pay him unless they win a settlement. The simplest way this works is that Toff sends an employer a demand letter informing them they owe a such-and-such amount in unpaid wages to his client, and that they also owe his fee, which might be $2,000 at that point. “So pay by Friday, or we will file a wage lien against your home in Bellevue and then file the lawsuit shortly thereafter, and we will win, and you will owe a shit-ton more, because you will owe the attorney’s fees, which at that point will not be $2,000, they will be $50,000,” Toff says. This can be a compelling threat.  Toff’s most famous suit was the class action against against Canlis, which he led while working at the local employment law firm Maloney O’Laughlin. Filed on behalf of all non-managers at the fine dining restaurant, it accused Canlis of requiring hourly workers to perform an initial unpaid “stage” shift in order to be hired and for not distributing all the money it collected via its “service charge” to the staff, as its menus claimed until mid-2022. Evan Gallo, a former server and one of the named plaintiffs, says that in the run-up to the suit, some employees had circulated a petition asking for higher wages. Management declined this request, claiming they wanted to keep prices relatively low to be within reach of the non-super-rich, according to Gallo. Dissatisfied with that response, the workers looked into suing. Gallo called several lawyers but “got the best vibe from Steven,” he says. “He’s very motivated to fight for the little guy.” Gallo helped sift through the timesheet records Canlis sent to the law firm to identify instances of workers not getting the service charge money they were due. This experience inspired Gallo to enroll in law school after the case concluded; he now works as Toff’s legal assistant. The suit, though, was divisive among the Canlis staff, Gallo says. Some workers regarded Canlis as a great place to work and disagreed with the decision to sue. (Another plaintiff says that they lost friends on the Canlis staff who sided with Canlis management.) After going through mediation, Canlis settled the lawsuit for $1.45 million in 2024. It did not admit any wrongdoing. Toff launched Bread Roses not long after that. He says the Canlis suit was “one of the cases that confirmed for me that there was real need, and real opportunity, for a workers’-rights practice focused on things like wage theft, including in industries like restaurants where violations can be widespread, but individual workers often do not have enough economic power to bring claims on their own.” These lawsuits are sometimes an imperfect vehicle for workers’ grievances. The Canlis employees who came to Toff had complaints that went beyond the service charge language—it was just that the service charge issue provided a pathway to legal action.  Workers in the notoriously chaotic restaurant industry don’t really have many other options when they’re unhappy with management, as evidenced by how few restaurants in Seattle have unionized. (After Capitol Hill diner Glo’s unionized in 2023, workers voted to decertify the union months later after some staff turnover.) Organizers at the Sea Creatures restaurant group did succeed in securing contracts at the Walrus and the Carpenter and both locations of the General Porpoise doughnut chain after workers went on strike, but haven’t gotten a contract at the Capitol Hill steakhouse Jeffry’s. Another obstacle restaurant unions face is that sometimes these businesses don’t make enough money to give employees substantially more wages or benefits. (Restaurants generally have profit margins under 9 percent, and a recent National Restaurant Association report found that 42 percent of restaurants weren’t profitable.) That’s what unionized workers at Sea Wolf Bakers learned last year when management opened their books during negotiations. Instead of an hourly wage increase, the two sides eventually agreed to let workers accept tips for the first time. Similarly, in the contracts negotiated by United Creatures of the Sea, unionized workers agreed to lower base pay rates and fewer benefits in exchange for the service charge model being scrapped in favor of receiving more tips. Could there be some middle path between piecemeal lawsuits and high-effort union drives? Toff wonders if some restaurants could adopt simplified collective bargaining agreements that spell out basic pay and working conditions. “At a union restaurant in Seattle, there’s a 20 percent service charge and 100 percent goes to the workers,” Toff imagines, “and a sticker goes in the window that says, ‘This is a union restaurant.’” In progressive Seattle, where plenty of restaurant owners want to be seen treating their employees well, maybe something like that could work. Canlis is far from the only Seattle restaurant to have been sued over its service charge language. Upscale diner chain Skillet and Tom Douglas’s restaurant group were targeted by similar lawsuits; like Canlis, both settled rather than going to trial. Some restaurant owners have privately complained to me that these suits punish them for technicalities. They argue that restaurants tend to shift to service charge models in order to address pay inequities caused by tipping; service charge money really does go to workers. But when a restaurant says that all of a service charge is distributed to workers, it has to meticulously track where every dollar goes or face legal liability. As a result, Seattle restaurants tend to adopt safer language. Canlis’s menu now reads, “A 20% service charge will be added to your final bill. 100% of this service charge is retained by Canlis.”  Toff thinks a service fee that doesn’t go to workers is “disingenuous,” and that in practice, restaurants are “just artificially deflating the cost of things on [their] menus.” He has a punk’s instinctive hatred of hypocrisy: Why can’t restaurants just work all of their costs into menu prices? If they won’t raise those prices out of fear of driving away customers but are really paying a living wage, why not just list the employees’ hourly pay on the receipt? Given his background, it’s no surprise that Toff has no problem simply asking waiters how much they make. One time he did this and the server wouldn’t tell him. It eventually came out that the server was also the owner.  “And I said, ‘Oh, how much do the workers make?’” Toff says. “And he said, ‘I’d rather not answer that question.’”  The post The Lunch Lawyer appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less