Seven New York City McDonald’s restaurant franchises and their owner Richard Cisneros will pay $500,000 for failing to pay legally-required laundry allowances for many employees, for uncompensated work time and for unlawful deductions from wages that resulted when cashiers were required to cover cash register shortfalls.

The settlement money, which includes damages and interest, will go to more than 1,600 mostly minimum wage workers who were shortchanged by these franchises.

The settlement is the second to come out of ongoing investigations of numerous fast food employers by the Attorney General’s Labor Bureau for labor law violations.

In December, the Attorney General secured reinstatement for twenty five workers at a Domino’s pizza franchise located in Washington Heights, in New York City.

“Like every other business in New York State, fast food employers must follow our labor laws,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said. “Our lowest wage workers deserve the same protections of the law as everyone else. It’s critical, for them and for their families as well as for our economy, that we remain vigilant so that no New Yorkers are cheated out of their hard won earnings.”

The investigation found that from 2007 to July 2013, the Cisneros Group restaurants failed to pay certain of their 700 cashiers at the restaurants for time periods when they were required to work “off-the-clock” before and after some of their shifts.

The restaurants also required some cashiers to make up cash register shortages out of their own money when the registers were short of funds at the end of the workers’ shifts.

When a business requires employees to wear uniforms like the ones in this case, New York law requires employers either to launder the uniforms, provide sufficient wash and wear uniforms for each day of the work week, or pay employees a “uniform maintenance allowance,” in an amount set by law, in order to cover the employees’ costs of laundering the uniforms.

Cisneros and his companies did not pay employees the uniform maintenance allowance required by law.

More than half of the settlement money will go to reimburse uniformed workers who were not paid this allowance as required.

Other violations included failure to pay workers an extra hour of pay at minimum wage when they worked more than 10 hours in a day, as required by New York law.