Starbucks hit with class action lawsuit over tips

March 25, 2008 05:06 PM Email| Comments (1)| Text size – +

By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe staff

Starbucks may say it is committed to ``putting people before products,'' but that hasn't stopped a former barista at a Chestnut Hill store from accusing the coffee giant of shortchanging him on tips for serving caffeine-craving customers.

In a class action suit filed today in Suffolk Superior Court, Hernan Matamoros says Starbucks routinely violated Massachusetts law by requiring baristas to share money left in tip jars with shift supervisors, who perform similar duties but have managerial responsibilities.

``Every customer who walks in the door isn't necessarily thinking about who's getting the tips, but one would assume it's going to the workers and not the managers,'' said Shannon Liss-Riordan, one of the Boston lawyers representing Matamoros.

Matamoros, an 18-year-old Somerville resident who worked briefly at a Starbucks on Boylston Street and is now employed by another coffee shop, declined to be interviewed, Liss-Riordan said.

The suit came five days after a California judge, ruling in a nearly identical class-action suit, ordered Starbucks to pay baristas in that state more than $100 million in back tips, plus interest, that the company handed over to shift supervisors.

Some of the more than 120,000 current and former baristas affected by the California suit could each receive more than $10,000, said Terry Chapko, a lawyer from suburban San Diego who represented the plaintiffs. Starbucks condemned the ruling as ``an extreme example of an abuse of the class-action procedures in California courts'' and vowed to appeal.

Faced with a second class-action suit boiling over on the other side of the country, a Starbucks spokeswoman at the company's headquarters in Seattle said today they could not comment on the pending lawsuit because officials had not seen it.