They Drove Their Own Cars. Papa John’s Kept the Difference.

Andrew Bazemore worked as a delivery driver for a Papa John’s location in Louisville, Kentucky. Like most delivery drivers at fast food chains, he used his own vehicle — burning his own gas, putting miles on his own car, paying for his own insurance. Papa John’s was responsible for reimbursing those expenses. According to Bazemore’s lawsuit, filed in June 2022 under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the company reimbursed him at a rate low enough that his total effective compensation fell below the federal and state minimum wage.

This is wage theft. The mechanism is indirect but the result is the same: a worker who begins a shift legally entitled to at least minimum wage ends it having earned less. The vehicle expense reimbursement is the math that makes the difference. When the company lowballs that number, the cost of doing the job comes out of the worker’s own pocket.

Bazemore brought the case as a class action, meaning he sued on behalf of himself and every other Papa John’s delivery driver placed in the same position. The potential scope of this lawsuit extended far beyond one driver in one city.

The Numbers Behind the Theft

The Arbitration Trap: Sign Something You Never Saw

Papa John’s response to the lawsuit was a legal maneuver that has become standard practice among corporations facing worker claims: force the case out of court and into private arbitration. Arbitration is a closed-door process with no jury, no public record, and an arbitrator paid by the industry. Companies win the overwhelming majority of arbitration cases against workers. Sending Bazemore there would have almost certainly ended his case without ever reaching a ruling on the wage theft itself.

To do this, Papa John’s needed to prove that Bazemore had signed an arbitration agreement when he was hired. The company’s Senior Director of People Services submitted a declaration saying that Papa John’s requires all new employees to sign such an agreement as a condition of employment. She further stated that company records showed Bazemore had electronically signed the agreement on October 10, 2019, using a multi-step electronic system called e-Forms. According to the declaration, that system requires the user to sign in with a personal user ID and password, scroll through the entire agreement, and check a box to confirm signing.

Bazemore responded with a sworn declaration of his own, submitted under penalty of perjury. He stated that before this lawsuit, he had never seen the arbitration agreement and had never heard about it. He also disclosed something far more troubling: his login credentials were built from demographic information available on his job application, and he had personally witnessed his manager log in on his behalf and on behalf of other delivery drivers in order to complete training materials for them.

Someone Else Was Clicking “I Agree” for These Workers

Let that sink in. Bazemore’s testimony described a workplace where managers apparently had both the access and the habit of completing digital paperwork while logged in as their employees. The same system Papa John’s used to claim Bazemore had “signed” an arbitration agreement was the same system where his manager could and apparently did act as him.

Bazemore asked the lower court for targeted discovery — meaning a limited investigation into whether he had actually signed the agreement. A reasonable ask. The lower court denied it, dismissed his case, and sent it to arbitration anyway — dismissing Bazemore’s sworn testimony as “a convenient lapse in memory.” The court essentially told a worker that a company’s digital record outweighs his testimony given under penalty of perjury.

The federal appeals court reversed that decision, ruling clearly that Bazemore’s testimony created a genuine issue of material fact — a legal standard meaning a reasonable person could believe his account, which means he deserves a trial on the question. The appeals court also pointed out that the lower court had incorrectly placed the burden of proof on Bazemore, when the law actually required Papa John’s to prove the agreement existed.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What the Numbers Cannot Capture

Andrew Bazemore drove a car he owned, burned fuel he paid for, and accepted the wear and tear that delivery driving puts on a vehicle’s tires, brakes, and engine. Every mile he drove for Papa John’s transferred a real cost from the corporation to him. This is the physical reality underneath the legal language. The Fair Labor Standards Act minimum wage protection exists precisely to prevent this kind of cost-shifting — to ensure that a corporation cannot use accounting tricks to make workers subsidize the business’s own operating expenses.

But the deeper violation in this case is what happened when Bazemore tried to do something about it. He signed a declaration under penalty of perjury stating he had never seen the arbitration agreement Papa John’s was using to shut him down. Perjury carries federal criminal penalties. Bazemore put his name on a legal document knowing the consequences of lying. The lower court’s decision to dismiss that testimony as “a convenient lapse in memory” was a message to every worker in a similar position: your word means nothing against a company’s database entry.

Bazemore also testified that he had watched his manager log into the e-Forms system as him and as other delivery drivers to complete training materials. Think about what that means for every other document those workers “signed” through that system. Arbitration agreements. Conduct policies. Non-compete clauses. Any document a corporation might want a worker to have “agreed to” could have been processed the same way. These workers did not know what was being committed in their names, with their login credentials, using information pulled from their job applications.

Then Papa John’s made one more move. After the lawsuit was filed, the company argued that because Bazemore kept showing up to work, he had implicitly agreed to the arbitration terms he was simultaneously fighting in court. The appeals court rejected this argument clearly. But the argument itself reveals a corporate worldview in which a minimum-wage worker’s decision to keep their job, rather than quit in protest over legal documents they dispute, counts as consent to surrender their legal rights. Every day you don’t walk off the job is reinterpreted as agreement. That is the logic of coercion dressed up in contract language.

Legal Receipts: The Court’s Own Words

These are direct quotations from the federal court record. They are not paraphrased.

Societal Impact Mapping: Who Else Gets Hurt

Economic Inequality: The System Is Built This Way

Delivery driving is one of the most common low-wage jobs in America. The model Papa John’s allegedly used — paying a flat, low reimbursement rate rather than the IRS standard mileage rate — is widespread across fast food delivery chains. When a company under-reimburses vehicle expenses, the worker eats the cost through gas, maintenance, and depreciation. The effective hourly rate drops. This is not an accident or an oversight; it is a structural choice that moves money from workers’ pockets into corporate margins.

Bazemore’s case was filed as a class action, meaning the alleged underpayment affected every delivery driver at Papa John’s in the same situation, not just one person. The number of affected workers is not specified in the source, but Papa John’s operates thousands of locations across the United States. The aggregate wage theft, if the allegations are proven true, could represent millions of dollars in stolen compensation from workers who are already at or near the bottom of the wage scale.

The arbitration angle compounds the inequality. Mandatory arbitration agreements strip low-wage workers of their most powerful legal tool: the class action lawsuit. When workers cannot band together, each worker faces the company alone in a private forum. The playing field in arbitration heavily favors corporations. A delivery driver in Louisville, Kentucky does not have the same resources as Papa John’s International, Inc. The system Papa John’s allegedly used to compel arbitration was designed to make it impossible for workers to access the collective legal remedy the law provides them.

Public Health: The Hidden Cost of the Drive

Delivery drivers who are not adequately reimbursed for vehicle expenses face a documented economic pressure to defer vehicle maintenance. Brakes, tires, and lights that need service get delayed when a worker cannot afford repairs. This is a public safety issue: under-maintained vehicles on delivery routes affect not only the driver but every pedestrian and motorist sharing the road. The cost-shifting from corporation to worker does not stop at the driver’s wallet.

Beyond physical safety, the psychological toll of wage theft is real and documented in occupational health research. Workers who believe they are being cheated — who watch their paycheck shrink below legal minimums after expenses — experience elevated stress, financial insecurity, and reduced quality of life. These are health outcomes. They do not appear in a company’s quarterly earnings report, but they land in emergency rooms, in families, and in communities.

The Cost of a Life Metric

What Now: Who to Watch and What to Do

The case returns to the lower court for proceedings consistent with the appeals court ruling. A genuine trial on the arbitration question must now occur. Papa John’s must prove, not assume, that Bazemore signed that agreement. The underlying wage theft claims have not yet been decided on the merits.

Corporate Roles in This Case

The declaration used to compel arbitration came from Papa John’s Senior Director of People Services. The defendants are Papa John’s U.S.A., Inc. and Papa John’s International, Inc. — both named in the suit, both arguing to keep this case out of court.

What You Can Do Right Now

If you are a current or former Papa John’s delivery driver who was not fully reimbursed for vehicle expenses, you may be a member of the class Bazemore is representing. Contact a wage and hour attorney. Many work on contingency, meaning no upfront cost to you. Your testimony matters, and there is power in numbers.

Support the fight against mandatory arbitration clauses at a national level. Organizations like the Economic Policy Institute and the National Employment Law Project track and challenge the use of these clauses to silence workers. Mutual aid networks in your city often connect workers to legal aid resources at no cost. Find your local worker center. Show up. The system changes when people refuse to accept that their continued employment means they forfeited their rights.