New USDOL Wage Hour Administrator Issues Opinion Letter Finding Paralegals Can Be Exempt: A New Day Dawning!
Under the Trump Administration, there has been a return to the issuance of Opinion Letters which I have highly applauded. I also applaud the rather pro-employer stance that many of these Letters have reflected. Another example of both
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
The USDOL has proposed a new cut-down (watered down?) test for determining when entities are a joint employer. Such a finding leads to the aggregating of employee hours which are worked at both places as well as rendering the entities jointly liable for wage-hour (e.g. overtime) violations.
The focus of the new proposal is a
Even the most well-intentioned employer who wants to comply with the FLSA will have trouble, as there are many gray, nuanced provisions and regulations in this law, especially on overtime computation. One of these is the requirement to include non-discretionary bonuses in the overtime calculation of non-exempt workers. That may now be changing as the
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 do I always say? If an employer is sued in a FLSA action, collective or otherwise, and is unionized, always look for a National Labor Relations Act/Labor Management Relations Act preemption defense. Well, it has happened again! A federal judge has dismissed a collective action alleging that a rehabilitation center did not pay nurses
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
Employers should always look for a preemption defense when a FLSA suit is lodged against a unionized client. Clear proof of that was just given by the Ninth Circuit when that Court held that unionized offshore oil rig workers could not pursue overtime claims because the Labor Management Relations Act (LMRA) barred the suit.
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