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I have many clients that want to comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) and pay workers properly, especially for overtime. However, I have found that even the most well-intentioned employers sometimes will not consider the nuances and vagaries of overtime calculations under the FLSA and a class action is the result. In this…

When two entities are a joint employer, or could be deemed as such, they must aggregate the hours worked by employees at each facility in a given week. If those hours exceed forty in total, then overtime must be paid. Sometimes, the entities either believe they are not a joint employer or, simply, do not…

Many employers believe that if an employee (or many employees) perform a tiny amount of work, or work-like activity, before their shifts, that brief off-the-clock, activity cannot be “working time” under the FLSA. This is the essence of the de minimis defense. Well, they are wrong, as a recent case illustrates. The case also is…

I have written about call center cases, which involve allegedly unpaid working time, many times. Well, they continue to pop up. In a recent case, a class of workers claim that they were expected/required to handle customer calls after the end of their shifts, during their break times, as well as performing additional off-the-clock tasks.…

In a chicken-and-egg type of case, an unusual case, the Third Circuit has emphatically held a Judge taking over a class action case must deal with the threshold issue of whether a class should be certified prior to a trial commencing on the collective claims of the class. The Court sternly warned that if this…

The issue of misclassification of workers as exempt when they might not be has been around for a very long time. Another class of such workers has been certified in the health care industry. The federal Judge has granted final certification to two classes of workers claiming they are entitled to overtime. The classes will…

This is an interesting and rather unique situation. Two lawyers who represent a putative class of workers who filed a class action under the Fair Labor Standards Act now want to withdraw from the case. They assert that they have had no contact with their clients, the named plaintiffs, for many weeks. The workers 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…

As a general rule, employee expense reimbursements are not includible in the regular rate for purposes of overtime computation.  When the reimbursements, however, are unreasonable or out of whack (i.e. too high) as regards the particular expense, then the USDOL takes the position that the reimbursements are really a backdoor way of paying the employee…