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
Conditional Certification
Another Construction Industry Wage-Hour Lawsuit: The Trend Continues
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…
Flimsy Affidavit From Named Plaintiff Insufficient to Secure Conditional Certification in FLSA Collective Action: A Case for Sanity!
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…
Another FLSA Misclassification Case in the Energy Industry: A Continuing (and Troubling) Phenomenon
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…
Another Assistant Manager FLSA Class Action Goes Down—When Will They Ever Learn?
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,…
Joint Employer Angle Gives Interesting Twist to FLSA Truck Driver Collective Action
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…
Employee Status Will Not Be Determined by Judge in Conditional Certification Stage in FLSA Collective Action
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…
Yet Another Store Manager FLSA Lawsuit: The Hits Just Keep On Coming
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…
Third Circuit Rules on Two Class Actions in Same Decision and Opines on Doctrine of Pendant Jurisdiction
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…
FLSA Proposed Class Cut By Judge Who Found Dissimilarities Among Workers
Often, when a class of workers petitions for conditional certification in FLSA collective action, and such certification is granted, it usually is for the entire class being asked for. Sometimes it is not and when that happens, it is “news.” That has happened in a recent Pennsylvania case where the proposed class was more than…