Din Tai Fung Wage Theft Settlement: $567K, Seattle Findings

The Din Tai Fung wage theft settlement, announced by the Seattle Office of Labor Standards on June 18, 2025, requires the Taiwanese dumpling chain to pay $567,361.32 to 1,245 current and former Seattle employees and to scrap workplace policies that investigators said discouraged workers from using legally protected paid sick leave.¹

What Seattle Investigators Found

The Office of Labor Standards investigated three related entities: Din Tai Fung (Pacific Place) Restaurant, LLC; Din Tai Fung (University Village) Restaurant, LLC; and DTF Prep Seattle, LLC, a commissary kitchen in Sodo. Together the three sites employed about 590 workers at the time of the investigation. The conduct at issue covered January 11, 2020 through December 6, 2023.²

Investigators alleged two categories of violations under Seattle law. Under the city’s Paid Sick and Safe Time ordinance, employers with 250 or more workers must let employees accrue one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked. Investigators said Din Tai Fung ran an attendance points system that penalized absences, which had the effect of discouraging workers from using the sick time they had earned.³ Under the city’s Wage Theft Ordinance, the company was also accused of failing to provide required rest and meal breaks, which Seattle treats as unpaid wages.¹

What the Settlement Requires

The $567,361.32 in restitution will be divided among the 1,245 affected workers, a group that includes both current staff and former employees from the covered period. The case was resolved without a formal enforcement order, and the available records do not show any separate civil penalties payable to the city.²

Din Tai Fung also agreed to change how it runs its Seattle restaurants:

Eliminate the attendance points policy investigators tied to sick leave interference.
Develop and implement a written Paid Sick and Safe Time policy that complies with Seattle law.
Adopt written meal and rest break policies and improve systems for tracking attendance and break compliance.
Provide employees with the written employment notices required by the Wage Theft Ordinance.

⁴

What the Company and the City Said

In a statement to the Seattle Times, Din Tai Fung said it had put in place improved attendance and break-tracking systems, added management training, and built internal processes to maintain compliance. “We recognize the importance of ensuring those policies are clearly communicated and consistently applied,” the company said, adding that “these measures reflect our ongoing efforts to care for our team at the highest standard.”⁴

OLS Director Steven Marchese described the settlement as a reminder that “compliance with Seattle labor laws is not optional.”¹

How It Compares to Other Seattle Restaurant Cases

The payout is substantial for a restaurant matter but not the largest the office has resolved. The biggest restaurant case on Seattle’s books remains the roughly $3.49 million assessed against Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot in late 2020 for minimum wage, overtime, scheduling, and sick leave violations affecting 147 former employees. Jimmy John’s settled for about $625,000 in 2024, and Red Robin for roughly $402,000 in 2022.⁵

The Separate Australian Wage Theft Case

The Seattle settlement is unrelated to a much harsher Australian action against a different operator of the brand. In April 2024, the Federal Court of Australia imposed $4.09 million in penalties on the former operators of Din Tai Fung restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne, the second-highest penalty the country’s Fair Work Ombudsman had ever secured. That case involved the deliberate underpayment of 17 workers, most of them young migrants from Indonesia and China on student or employer-sponsored visas, between July 2014 and June 2018, with the operators keeping one set of accurate records and a second set of falsified pay slips and timesheets to deceive regulators.⁶

The Australian restaurants were run by a separate franchisee, not by Din Tai Fung’s family-owned North American operation, and the Taiwan headquarters terminated its Australian franchise agreement in 2025 after all locations there had closed.⁷

1
City of Seattle. Din Tai Fung Settlement Announcement
2
City of Seattle. Resolved Investigations, April-June 2025
3
City of Seattle. Paid Sick and Safe Time
4
Seattle Times. Seattle’s Din Tai Fung Restaurants Pay, Settle Wage Theft Case
5
City of Seattle. Resolved Investigations
6
Fair Work Ombudsman (Australia). DTF World Square Penalty
7
Inside Retail Asia. Din Tai Fung Terminates Australian Franchisee After Major Wage Violation