Terminated day after coworker and I inquired about unpaid wages

Location: Colorado

Hi all,

I wanted to ask about a situation that happened recently to a coworker and I. We were hired by a restaurant company to open a new concept as mixologists/servers. We were given two weeks to train in all things wine, liquor and service.

Initially things started out fine, we were given a schedule for the first week to talk and taste wines to develop palettes. The second week is when things fall apart. We were given a schedule for the week to help put the restaurant together and start coming up with cocktails. A coworker and I offered to come in earlier then scheduled, as we realized there was way too much work to do to get ourselves to the standard the restaurant was asking of us by their initial opening date. Our 3-hour training days turned into 10-hour days as we would come in a couple hours before and stay much after to clean up the day’s work and put things away.

While we should’ve established that we would still get paid for the extra hours we were coming in, we didn’t. Friday the manager informs us that the hours we came in early will not be accounted for, but the hours we stayed late would. Obviously we’re pissed off, but assume what he says is true, so we continue on working as we needed to. We have a phone conversation were he notes that if our paychecks aren’t where we expect them to be, he would venmo us $150 each to make up for it, a fact he brings up in a later conversation as well with the director.

Opening day gets delayed two weeks, and now we are hurting for money. We have two more training shifts that were explicitly told to us would be paid, but nothing else in these two weeks. We have one more company meeting, where a coworker and I receive our first paycheck since getting hired four weeks ago. It predictably is under what we expect, by around 20 hours. We pull aside our manager and director (in charge of paychecks) to ask about why this was. The director states that he was very clear with the manager what we would be paid for, and to send us home after those hours. Manager tells us that he was also clear to us about paid hours, which is false. We go home, expecting to come in for a long training day tomorrow to prepare for new opening the next day. We are never given a time to come in, until 5pm the next day where we our employment is terminated because “culturally” we are not a great fit. This was yesterday and we have still not received the rest of our paychecks.

My questions are: Is this retaliatory termination? Would this be worth pursuing legally? How would I go about pursuing this? Does the lack of documentation for these “paid” hours, outside of surveillance footage of coming in to work severely hurt our case?

Thanks guys!