After the Attorney General’s office investigated the claims, Five Horses Tavern in Davis Square agreed to pay for minimum wage violations. But some former employees say it’s not enough.

Jabari Morgan started working at Five Horses Tavern in Davis Square in 2014 after moving to Boston to pursue a career as an artist. Having worked in restaurants since being a teen in South Dakota, Morgan landed a job as a waiter.

At first, Five Horses seemed like a typical restaurant, though he said he noticed things were run differently on the East Coast. For starters, he remembers, management would have waitstaff come in early on Friday and sit at the bar, just in case it was busy and they needed extra hands.

“You’d hang at the bar ... and then you could leave and come back for your shift,” said Morgan. “On occasion ... they would buy you a $5 pizza or a taco. But otherwise you just sat there and waited to see if you were going on the clock. It was mandatory if you were going to keep your job.”

He said he endured long unpaid shifts, paying for spilled beers and abandoned bills, and a stressful environment for almost two years before realizing the treatment of workers was a problem.

In May 2016, former employee Allison Frost filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office, joined by almost two dozen employees, including Morgan. After the AG investigated the claims, Five Horses agreed to a $15,000 settlement for wage theft violations.

Five Horses owner Dylan Welsh said the restaurant was first contacted in July 2016 and worked closely alongside with the AG’s office for the next 10 months.

“We do the best we can everyday to look out, not just for our guests, but also our employees, so I was surprised to get a call.” Welsh said in a phone interview. “It was something we took very seriously and we jumped right on it.”

The AG’s office found the company failed to “pay the proper service rate” to employees in 2016, directly violating minimum wage laws. Welsh said the violations were the result of a switch in payroll companies in the winter of 2016.

When the minimum wage increased from $3 to $3.45, he continued, the tavern was in between companies and it was something management didn’t catch.

“I’m not going to sit here and blame the payroll company because it’s my job to make sure things like that get caught, and it didn’t,” said Welsh. “We corrected it ... We issued checks the very next month ... We figured out who worked during that time and who was shorted.”

According to the report, the company already paid an estimated $3,000 directly to employees, leaving an estimated $11,000 balance. In addition it will pay a penalty of an estimated $2,000 to the state.

But for Morgan and Frost, this isn’t enough. There were things worse than minimum wage violations, said Morgan, citing general mistreatment of workers, including at least one who was injured on the job.

Welsh said that incident never happened, and that all employees have workers’ compensation. Just last week, he said, a cook was injured with fry oil and was immediately sent to the hospital.

“My employees are my biggest asset ... I do whatever I can to make sure we run a very tight ship with their well-being in mind,” he said. “I strongly dispute other than what we were cited for.”

Though workers are being compensated for lost wages, said Frost, who worked at the restaurant for two months before quitting, the outcome of the suit is “bittersweet.” For a year, she said, she worked closely with lawyers to figure out a settlement. It seems like a “slap in the face,’ she said, to only be awarded money for the minimum wage grievances.

“The restaurant had a tendency to kind of give servers a responsibility that shouldn’t have fallen on them, especially when it came to cleaning the restaurant and the kitchen,” she said. “To have that kind of attitude and that dynamic is toxic and unhealthy ... It happens at so many restaurants and it’s wrong.”

A widespread problem

In a press release, labor-rights organizer Rand Wilson of Good Jobs Somerville said mistreatment of employees is happening across the restaurant industry, and not just in Somerville.

“Wage theft has been a major problem in the Boston restaurants for a long time,” he said in his statement. “What happened at Five Horses is happening every day in America.”

And the problem, agreed Morgan and Frost, is that employees are afraid to come forward. Because Frost worked at Five Horses temporarily until finding a job as a case manager for mental health patients, she wasn’t worried about job security and felt comfortable filing a complaint in May 2016. But for others who needed the money, it was better to stay quiet.

Welsh said employees never talked to management before contacting the AG.

Frost and Morgan said employees were always at risk, either of being fired or of punishment, such as being ordered to clean the restaurant's Dumpster.

“The government does want to help, but people have to feel comfortable doing and saying something,” Morgan said. “They aren’t going to do that if they have to fear retaliation.”

Morgan says he hopes their story is shared and helps change restaurant conditions, not just at Five Horses, but throughout Boston.

“We have reason to keep pursuing this matter,” he said. “There are more stories to be told ... My main interest has never been stopping this from happening just at (Five Horses) or just to me.”

Boston, Morgan continued, is a big offender of mistreatment. As a “birthplace of freedom,” he was shocked to see the city’s restaurants treat employees so poorly.

“With the current weight of the world ... it is getting easier to neglect and abuse the least among us,” said Morgan. “Bastions of light and freedom, like Boston ... people count on us to prevent and correct this kind of behavior.”