Unpaid Overtime Pay

Retail workers have tough, demanding jobs and they put in long hours – often more than 40 a week. When they work overtime, retail employees sacrifice being with family or enjoying leisure activities. Because of this, labor laws such as the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), as well as many state and local regulations, stipulate that hourly workers must be paid time-and-a-half for overtime.

The Specter of Unpaid Overtime that Haunts the Retail Industry

Unfortunately, many retailers attempt to cut costs by cheating employees out of overtime. This can take several forms:

• Off-the-clock work: Retail workers are often asked to complete job-related tasks before and after their shifts for which they are not compensated. For example, TJ Maxx recently paid employees $8.5 million to settle a class action lawsuit. The workers alleged they had to spend time after they clocked out waiting for managers to close up the store – for which they should have been paid overtime but were not.
• Misclassification. This is a serious problem for retail workers. Employers often give hourly employees – who should be paid time-and-a-half for any hours worked above 40 in a week – titles that sound managerial. These can be “assistant store manager” or “assistant store supervisor.” The company then classifies the employee as exempt from overtime. The problem is that, in many cases, those employees have the same duties as hourly workers – and should be getting paid overtime.
• Forced to work through meal breaks. While meal breaks are not required in most states, hourly employees who receive a 30-minute unpaid meal break should not have to perform any work-related tasks during the break. However, retailers often force workers to not only work during unpaid meal breaks, but then do not pay them for that time. This can add up, adding up to 30 minutes to a day – and put a retail worker well above 40 hours in a week, and therefore owed overtime.

Retail Workers Have a Right to Receive Compensation for Unpaid Overtime

If a retailer violates the FLSA or state and local employment laws, workers have the right to sue for unpaid overtime and other compensation. This can often be done as a class action lawsuit, where retail workers take collective action against their employer.

If you and your colleagues work for a retailer who ducks paying overtime, you may want to consult an experienced employment litigation attorney and discuss a possible case.

When employees work overtime, they are often sacrificing precious time they could be spending with friends and family or on leisure activities. In return, they expect to be compensated for that sacrifice and earn time-and-a-half if they work more than 40 hours in a week.

It’s also the law under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as well as the employment statutes of many states.

How Compensating Workers with Gift Cards May Be Illegal

For employers, overtime is often essential to running their business – but it is also expensive. This is why some can be tempted to cut those costs wherever possible.

Sometimes, for example, employers will give workers gift cards instead of paying the full amount of the overtime they are owed. This is illegal and violates both the FLSA as well as employment laws in many states.

A former employee of Fuyao Glass recently sued the Dayton, Ohio company after she was given a $50 gift card instead of being paid overtime for working over a Thanksgiving weekend. In her class action lawsuit, Julia Staggs alleges employees were promised time-and-a-half to convince them to work during the holiday weekend – but only received the gift card.

Employers may get an additional windfall – at the expense of their employees – when they purpose gift cards in bulk at a discount from resellers and companies that provide employee rewards to mark length-of-service anniversaries. Others, particularly smaller businesses, may redeem loyalty points accrued on their corporate credit cards for gift cards.

Pursue Your FLSA Rights – Contact and Experienced Wage & Overtime Attorney

However an employer obtains gift cards, it is still illegal to give them to employees in lieu of paying them full overtime. Workers have a right to receive time-and-a-half for any time they work more than 40 hours a week. Anything less violates the law.

Workers who have received gift cards instead of full overtime pay may be able to recovery compensation for their lost wages. Employers may also be cheating employees out of their wages and overtime in other ways, too. Speaking with an experienced FLSA litigator is a good first step to find out if you might have a case.

A lawsuit was recently filed against Yelp, the San Francisco based company that provides business reviews, dining reservations, and other marketing services to businesses across the country. The lawsuit alleges that Yelp’s sales agents “were often on sales calls well past the end of their scheduled shift,” but that Yelp failed to pay them for all hours worked in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.  The lawsuit also makes claims for off-the-clock work for time spent starting-up and shutting-down computer systems and for time spent attending sales meetings and training sessions.  Although Yelp permits sales agents to record their own time, the lawsuit claims that sales agents were discouraged from recording any time worked outside of their scheduled shift start and end time.  The lawsuit seeks unpaid overtime wages for sales agents that worked in excess of forty hours in a single week.

Unpaid Overtime Wages in Violation of the FLSA

The Fair Labor Standards Act requires that non-exempt employees be paid at a rate of one-and-one-half times their regular hourly rate for any hours worked in excess of forty hours in any single work week.  Even if a non-exempt employee is paid on a salary basis they are still entitled to overtime premiums for any hours worked in excess of forty in a single work week.  According to the lawsuit, Yelp classified sales agents as non-exempt employees.

Individuals that are or were employed by Yelp at any one of its brick-and-mortar call centers may be eligible to join in the lawsuit to collect unpaid wages.