Conditional Certification

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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…

The construction industry has had a long history of wage violations, whether of prevailing wage laws or just “ordinary” wage hour laws. Another example of this trend has emerged in New Jersey where an entity (and its subcontractors) have been sued in federal court in a collective action for alleged failure to pay overtime. The…

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…

There have been a host of wage hour cases in the energy industry and I have often commented upon these.  Many concern misclassification issues and another example of this phenomenon has arisen where a class of pipeline inspectors has requested that a federal court approve a settlement amounting to more than $2,000,000 where the theory…

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,…

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…

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…

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…