Class Actions

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The issue of payment (or not) for undergoing security checks has been a hot item of late, especially since the US Supreme Court issued its momentous decision in Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk. Now, these controversies have taken on a new tweak with COVID-related screenings. In a recent case, a group of workers are…

I have blogged many times about cases where relatively small amounts of compensation, bonus type compensation, are not included when an employer calculates the regular rate for overtime and a class action ensues. Now, this is happening with COVID-related bonuses and extra monies. A recent example is a case where a group of workers have…

A big part of defending any wage hour case and settling such a case is the issue of attorneys’ fees for the plaintiff’s lawyer. Plaintiff attorneys are always having grandiose notions of what they are entitled to and these issues often become the deal breaking issue of the litigation. Well, maybe us defense lawyers are…

One tactic to defeat a class action is to assert that the named plaintiff is not an appropriate or proper representative for the class. These initiatives are not often successful, but defense counsel should always be looking for them. A defendant employer is doing just that by asserting that a lead plaintiff does not share…

There have been a host of federal cases recently focusing on whether time spent waiting in security lines is compensable. Some have gone for the plaintiffs and others for the employer, as these cases are nuanced and fact-sensitive. A recent example of this genre is a Nike case where the Company will pay $8.25 million…

I have always been interested in the Motor Carrier Act (MCA) exemption of the Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 USC 213(b)(1), especially in the doctrine of “practical continuity” which is one of the ways that interstate commerce is determined and have defended a number of cases where we had to rely on practical continuity for…

Another exemption lawsuit has been filed.  What else is new?  This time, a group of nurses and care coordinators determine who analyze requests for coverage from health care providers have claimed they are entitled to overtime because they are non-exempt.  They have filed a collective action under the Fair Labor Standards Act.  The case is…

The employer who is fighting a collective or class action must make the argument that there is too much of a need for individual scrutiny to allow a class to proceed.  There are times that argument works, and times it does not.  An Illinois federal Judge has recently conditionally certified a class of logistics workers…