collective action

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The health care industry seems to be ground zero for a particular kind of class action lawsuit.  Many of these health care institutions have policies where a thirty-minute lunch period is automatically deducted from the daily scroll of hours.  This is quite understandable, from an operational perspective, as it usually is difficult for employees to…

In FLSA cases, plaintiff lawyers are always looking for a deep pocket and one of the avenues they use towards this “goal” is the joint employer doctrine.  That doctrine allows more than one employer to be liable for employee damages (e.g. overtime, back wages) if the employers are found to co-determine employee terms and conditions…

When the USDOL self-reporting program was announced, I was highly skeptical. Even though there seemed to be assurances that no undue enforcement actions would be taken, it just did not seem that employers would voluntarily subject themselves to such government review. Evidently, I was right. The USDOL has announced that this voluntary compliance program, the…

Well, here we are, still in the midst of this horrible COVID-19 pandemic, staying home, scared to go out, wearing masks and gloves, but yet, the first lawsuit(s) involving virus issues have already been filed. In this instance, right in my home state of New Jersey, a hair stylist has filed a class and collective…

It seems that plaintiffs (and their lawyers) think that all they have to do to get conditional certification is throw up a flimsy Affidavit from the named plaintiff and the Court will hand them conditional certification, like it is giving out candy.  Fortunately, in the District of New Jersey that is not the case, as…

It is fairly easy for a plaintiff to get conditional certification in a FLSA class action case, but that is not the end of the story.  The next step, much harder, is fending off the defendant’s anticipated motion to stop the class from receiving final certification.  It is even more difficult to withstand that defendant’s…

The whole trick for a plaintiff (and his lawyers) in a FLSA collective action case is to try to get conditional certification. Once that happens, the stakes automatically escalate for the defendant-employer, often leaving settlement as the most viable and cheapest manner of resolving the case. This process becomes more complicated when there is, as…

I have blogged numerous times about these automatic lunch deduction cases and have suggested remedies.  Yet, these cases proliferate.  Another very recent example is that of a hospital that has agreed to pay more than $4,000,000 to settle a FLSA collective action where the workers allege that their employer violated the Fair Labor Standards Act…

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…

What scares me the most about a USDOL audit or a FLSA lawsuit is the threat of liquidated damages. These damages, which double the wages due, are imposed almost routinely in court cases and are being imposed more and more by the administrative agency.  Well, sometimes the pendulum swings the other way, as illustrated by…