Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)

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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…

I have often lamented how easy it seems for plaintiffs to secure conditional certification in a FLSA collective action.  A few Affidavits, often identical in content, are produced and then, voila, the plaintiff gets conditional certification which then inordinately complicates matters for the employer and makes litigating the case and, of equal import, settling…

In class actions there is always a named plaintiff (or two or three, etc).  That person acts as the class representative and is the “flagship” for the entire case.  When that individual does something to jeopardize their status as such a “representative,” the entire case might go away.  That is precisely what happened in a…

USDOL

Lately, there has been a lot of “action” from the USDOL on the thorny and misunderstood issue of travel time.  The agency has just issued another Opinion Letter that addresses the issue of whether employers must pay workers for travel time on days when they spend part of the day working from home and the…

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…

Are two lawsuits better than one?  Not for the employer, I can tell you that.  A very interesting case is working its way through the federal courts now, where the US Department of Labor wants to take over a private lawsuit that has been filed alleging Fair Labor Standards Act violations.  The government is contending…

I have defended many cases in which the employee(s) claim they worked through lunch and are owed wages (or, usually, overtime).  These cases are usually difficult to defend unless the employer either compels employees to punch out and in for lunch or has another kind of fail-safe mechanism to account for this time, if legitimately…