Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)

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Another administrative exemption case, this time in the trucking industry, tests the contours of that vague, nuanced exemption and to what occupations it applies. In this case, a group of Logistics Coordinators contend they are not within the exemption because their primary duty was making sales and they were not paid on a salaried basis,…

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…

I always tell clients they must comply with both federal and state law, whatever State they are situate in, that complying with one is not a defense to not complying with the other, tougher, law. A sterling example of this concept has just arisen in a travel time case. Travel time issues are often murky,…

When I, as a management-side practitioner, defend a FLSA class action, the contingency I fear is that a court might find that the violation was “willful,” thereby extending the two-year statute of limitations to a third year. A recent case shows just how hard a defendant will fight against that third year. In this case,…

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…

I read an interesting post in the Seyfarth Shaw blog about out-of-state employees and their ability to become part of a FLSA collective/class action. The FLSA allows individuals to bring suits claims for overtime violations “for and in behalf of’ themselves and other “similarly situated” employees. Often, in these cases, there are but a few…

The New York City restaurant industry has, over the last several years, been hit with a flood of lawsuits. Many of these have focused on illegal tip pools but many have also alleged that employees were misclassified as exempt. These cases often generate large liabilities for employers and must be avoided. A recent example of…

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…

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…