Employers often do not like to pay overtime, although they must, and they sometimes come up with creative arrangements not to do so. That is fine, until an employee, often one who has been fired, files a lawsuit. Then, the company must resolve the lawsuit and fix the “problem” going forward. A recent example of
I love Assistant Manager class actions because it gives a defense lawyer a “golden” opportunity to defeat class certification by asserting that too much individual scrutiny is required to allow a class action to proceed. A beautiful example of this is a recent Walmart case where a group of Assistant Managers dropped their misclassification lawsuits,
Many times, plaintiff lawyers will try to file FLSA class actions as nationwide lawsuits so the size of the class and potential recovery can be magnified geometrically. Well, that just got a little harder to do as a federal judge rejected an attempt by a group of Outback Steakhouse front-of-house managers to continue as a
When employers classify individuals as independent contractors, they are not obligated to provide them with certain benefits, as they would statutory employees. Sometimes, if those individuals are found to not be independent contractors, those “failures” come back oftentimes to haunt the employers. Another example of this phenomenon has happened in that a New Jersey appellate
I continue to blog about working time cases because these are the kind of lawsuits that can sneak up on an employer who does not realize that a certain pre-shift activity may in fact constitute working time under the Fair Labor Standards Act. This is again illustrated by a trucking company case where the Company
There is no industry that is immune to wage hour or FLSA actions, including amateur sports leagues. In an interesting case, a federal Judge has granted conditional class certification to a class of members of an amateur football league who worked as referees and who were, they claim, compelled to perform the work of refereeing
I often preach that, when dealing with a class action, the employer should try to pick off the named plaintiff, perhaps overpaying to do so (or maybe not). In this interesting case, the parties settled (i.e. with the named plaintiff) right after the class had been decertified. The plaintiff had argued that he was misclassified
When will employers learn? They keep classifying retail Store Managers and Assistant Managers as exempt, when these workers are often misclassified, not intentionally, but because the nature of their duties often tends to undermine the primary duty test and render them non-exempt. Another example is a recent case where Store Managers have been granted conditional
In a very interesting and off-beat decision, the Third Circuit has thrown out one class of loan officers who alleged misclassification but let stand the lower court’s decision that certified the case as a collective action under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The case is entitled Reinig et al. v. RBS Citizens NA, and
It is not often when an employer defends a FLSA lawsuit by asserting that it is in an illegal business and therefore immune to suit. Sound funny? Well, that is precisely what a Colorado employer that furnishes security services to legal cannabis growers/sellers has pressed on the Tenth Circuit. The employer’s theory is that the