Republican secretary of state candidate Pat Proctor is running into questions about wage-and-hour violations found at two of his restaurants back in 2016.
The issue surfaced this week in an interview Proctor gave to Manhattan radio personality Mike Matson, who asked Proctor about Labor Department complaints that said two of his restaurants owed a little more than $93,000 in minimum wage and overtime back pay.
Proctor told Matson he ultimately paid “significantly” less than that amount. He told Matson that he paid in the range of $68,000 or $78,000, but said in an interview he believed it was less than that.
Proctor, a Republican lawmaker from Leavenworth, said it was a mistake because he was paying kitchen employees’ salaries and not hourly wages. He said the salary accounted for overtime.
He said the U.S. Labor Department notified him that kitchen employees could not be paid a salary and that because he wasn’t tracking their hours his restaurants would have to pay overtime they were due for working more than 40 hours a week
“We had negotiated salaries with all these people well over minimum wage,” Proctor told Matson on KMAN radio.
“One day, here comes the Labor Department in saying, ‘Hey, you owe all these people money because you didn’t record their hours.
“Here comes this bureaucrat into the restaurant with some regulation that we didn’t know about,” he said.
U.S. Labor Department data show that Proctor’s Ban Thai Restaurant in Manhattan owed 19 employees $13,818.50 in minimum-wage back pay and another $42,487.70 in overtime back pay for a total of $56,306.20.
A second restaurant in Manhattan – The Thai Noodle – owed five employees $56.88 in minimum wage pay and $23,649.08 in overtime for a total of $23,705.96, record show.
A third restaurant in Lawrence – now closed – owed seven employees $12,996 in overtime back wages.
“I have only been talking about this at every campaign stop for 18 months and have at least a half dozen videos on the internet talking about it, so I’m a little surprised it’s now being repackaged as a scandal and rolled out the week before early voting begins,” Proctor said in a statement.
Proctor told Matson that if he’s elected secretary of state that he wants to equip the agency’s business services division to notify new business owners of all the regulations that they are required to meet.
He said he wants to shift the burden of business owners needing to understand every regulation to requiring the government to help them understand the rules.
“I’m talking about arming folks with all of the information that they need to do the stuff up front and know what the rules are before they start without having to go hire a lawyer,” he said.
“Like many business owners, I’ve been the target of education by enforcement and fine,” Proctor said in a statement.
He said he wants to enable the business division with a website that could use artificial intelligence to “arm business owners with the rules up front and shift the burden from business owners having to know to the government having to tell you the requirements they place on you.”
He said he would advocate for a law that would forgive a business from fines if the website doesn’t provide business owners with the regulatory information they need to start a company.
Democratic secretary of state candidate Jennifer Day pounced on the Proctor interview.
“If Pat Proctor can’t pay his own employees, how can we trust him to run our elections,” she said.
“The fact that Proctor withheld tens of thousands of dollars from dozens of his employees – depriving workers of fair wages – shows he has no regard for the people of Kansas and that he thinks the rules don’t apply to him,” Day said.
“Pat Proctor is running for secretary of state, an office that oversees business filings and provides other services to Kansas businesses.
“My opponent has proven that he won’t put Kansans before his own interests, and it’s a record Kansas voters deserve to know about.”
Scott Morgan, the United Kansas candidate in the race, objected to Proctor’s plan to use the secretary of state’s office to advise businesses about regulation compliance. He said the secretary of state’s website says it’s a filing agency and does not provide legal guidance.
“If you don’t know that you have to comply with laws and regulations, how, exactly, are you qualified to be in charge of the state office responsible for accepting and maintaining filings from all of the Kansas businesses complying with laws and regulations?” Morgan asked.
The AFL-CIO joined in the criticism of Proctor on Thursday afternoon.
“Those kitchen workers put in long weeks over hot stoves, and Proctor didn’t pay them for it,” the union said in a statement.
“His answer now? Call the federal investigator ‘a bureaucrat,’ brag that he paid back less than he owed, and push a law so the next boss who cheats skips the fine,” the union said.
“Pat Proctor took the work and kept the pay. He has no business being secretary of state,” the union said.
Day recently released an internal poll showing the race for secretary of state with Proctor within the margin of error.
The poll by Democratic pollster Public Policy Polling of Raleigh, North Carolina, showed Proctor leading the race with 39% of the vote followed by Day with 37% of the vote.
The undecideds were 24%.
The poll did not include Scott Morgan, chief counsel to former Republican Gov. Mike Hayden who is running as the third candidate in the race under the United Kansas party label.
The campaign said the poll was done Aug. 31 through Sept.1 with a mix of landline calls and text messages to 542 likely Kansas voters.
The margin of error was 4.2%
