The owners of downtown Palo Alto restaurants Rangoon Ruby and Burma Ruby have been ordered by the state labor commissioner's office to pay $5 million in back wages to its workers and penalties to the state for wage-theft violations.

The violations span the owners' six Bay Area Burmese restaurants and were announced in a California Labor Commissioner's Office news release on Thursday.

Max Lee and John Lee, owners of Rangoon Ruby Investment LLC and Burma Ruby Investment LLC, must pay 298 workers $4,394,118 for unpaid wages, overtime and split-shift premiums, liquidated damages and itemized wage statement violations. They will also have to pay $574,150 in civil penalties to the state.

"Taking tips from workers and paying workers by salary to deny them their hard-earned overtime pay is wage theft," Labor Commissioner Julie A. Su said in the release. "Our job is to protect working people's right to a just day's pay for a hard day's work and to stop employers who embrace wage theft as a business model."

The restaurant chain did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The office launched its investigation into the Burmese restaurant chain after workers reported complaints of wage theft to the Asian Law Caucus, a San Francisco nonprofit that advocates for the legal and civil rights of low-income Asian Pacific American communities. The nonprofit also represents many of the workers who cooperated in the investigation, according to the labor commissioner's office.

The investigation found that 87 cooks, who were paid a fixed salary at the six restaurants, "typically" logged more than 10 hours of unpaid overtime each week. They are owed $3.8 million for unpaid overtime wages, minimum wages, split shift (when an employee's work schedule is broken up by non-paid and non-working time periods established by the employer and it is not a rest or a meal period), liquidated damages, waiting time penalties and failure to provide accurate itemized wage statements, the state labor office said.

Waiting-time penalties are imposed when an employer "intentionally fails to pay all wages due to the employee at the time of separation," according to the labor commissioner's office. This penalty is calculated by taking the employee's daily rate of pay and multiplying it by the number of days the employee was not paid, up to a maximum of 30 days.

When minimum-wage employees work a split shift, they are entitled to one hour of minimum wage as a premium.

The remaining 211 servers, hosts, dishwashers and bussers at the restaurant chain were not paid this daily, required extra hour when their employer scheduled them to work split shifts, according to the state labor office. The owners owe those workers $590,072 for split shifts and other wages and penalties owed.

The labor office's enforcement investigations typically include an audit of payroll for the previous three years to determine if there are minimum wage, overtime and other labor law violations and to calculate payments owed and penalties due, the state labor office said.

The Labor Commissioner's Office also cited a Daly City Japanese restaurant for more than $5.16 million in wage-theft violations involving more than 100 workers.

Rangoon Ruby opened at 445 Emerson St. in 2012 and Burma Ruby at 326 University Ave. just two years later.

The Labor Commissioner's Office, a division within the state Department of Industrial Relations, suggests employees with work-related questions or complaints to contact the department's call center in English or Spanish at 844-LABOR-DIR (844-522-6734).