Food

The High Cost of a $1 Slice

Image by flickr/Jason Lam

By Michael Kaminer June 23, 2015

There might be a high cost for those dollar pizza slices.

A class-action lawsuit is charging the Jewish owners of New York City’s with putting employees through 60- to 70-hour workweeks for less than minimum wage and no overtime, the Daily News reported today.

Eli and Oren Halali and their father Joshua, who own the chain, “built their dollar pizza empire on the backs of my clients and other workers by grossly underpaying them,” the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Adam Slater, told the News. “It’s just unfair.”

But the Halalis’ lawyer denies it all. “2 Bros. pays its employees in compliance with city, state and federal law and categorically denies the claims made by the plaintiffs. 2 Bros. is confident that it will prevail on the merits, attorney Howard Davis of Meister Seelig & Fein LLP told the Forward in an e-mail.

It’s not the first time Eli Halali’s made news. In a 2012 Associated Press report on questionable contributions to disgraced former Staten Island Congressman Michael Grimm, Halali was identified as the agent of a company that distributed porn movies – and a close associate of controversial Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto. The Forward reported on a top Pinto aide’s porn links in 2011.

2 Bros, in the meantime, continues serving the cut-rate ‘za that won it top prize in a Cheap Dollar Slice Pizza Showdown from the blog SeriousEats.

Michael Kaminer is a contributing editor at the Forward.

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