Michael Nuzzo says he and his siblings learned how to make pizza in their parents’ famed New Haven pizzeria, and his children should have the same opportunity in his restaurant.
That’s not the view of the state Department of Labor, whose special investigator visited Nuzzo’s Grand Apizza Shoreline at 9 E. Main St. earlier this month to tell him that his children could not be seen assisting their parents in the restaurant, under state statutes that prohibit the employment of minors in certain occupations.
Nuzzo and his wife, Magdalia, are challenging the state prohibition in federal court, arguing that the statute violates their constitutional rights, and the generations of restaurant history that are part of their Italian heritage.
“It’s our culture; it’s our tradition; it’s our civil right,” Nuzzo says of their parental right to have their children learn the pizza business as his father taught his children.
Michael Nuzzo’s parents, Fred and Rosemarie, opened the original Grand Apizza in New Haven in 1955, where it joined Sally’s, Pepe’s and Modern pizzerias as the four original New Haven pizza restaurants, Nuzzo says.
Nuzzo and his brothers and sister all worked in their parents’ restaurant as they grew up, and “now all of us have our own (pizza) businesses because of what our father taught us,” he explains. It was commonplace in New Haven pizzerias for the kids to work on weekends with their parents, Nuzzo says.
Moreover, Nuzzo says it’s a matter of not wanting to leave their children — ages 13, 11, and 8 — at home while he and his wife work during the weekend. “It’s to have our children with us,” he said.
Clinton attorney Raymond Rigat, who is representing the Nuzzos, said the couple’s children are with them after school Fridays and on Saturdays, and do not operate dangerous equipment, are not paid wages and are under the direct supervision of their parents and occasionally their grandparents.
“The kids are not paid, and they’re not employees,” Rigat says. Labor Department investigator Thomas Keyes, who visited the restaurant May 12, “took the position that they’re still working. I don’t think the statute applies and that it’s overly broad.”
The Nuzzos are asking the federal court for a ruling preventing the state from prohibiting their children from “learning the pizza trade under their parents’ tutelage at their restaurant,” as the suit reads.
State statute 31-23 prohibits minors under the age of 16 from being employed or working in any “manufacturing, mechanical, mercantile or theatrical industry, restaurant or public dining room, or in any bowling alley, shoe-shining establishment or barbershop,” except under certain specific circumstances.
Minors generally are prohibited from working in any occupation considered hazardous to health, unless it’s related to a work-study program, but kids over the age of 14 can work as caddies at a golf course or in certain occupations in food stores for limited hours.
State statutes, however, do not appear to prevent children from performing chores at their parents’ farms, as farm children have done for hundreds of years.
