In late 2020, Tyson Foods fired seven of its pork processing plant managers after they were caught betting on which of their employees would next get sick with Covid. At that time, more than 1,000 Tyson employees had fallen ill, and six had died. In announcing the firings, the company's President and CEO said, "The behaviors exhibited by these individuals do not represent the Tyson core values, which is why we took immediate and appropriate action to get to the truth. Now that the investigation has concluded, we are taking action based on the findings."
Not content with leaving well enough alone, five of the seven fired managers sued Tyson Foods claiming that the company owed them a bonus payment pursuant to the company's Annual Incentive Plan.
Let's say you have an employee who works 40 hours per week at the rate of $13.00 per hour. Now let's say that same employee needs to start working 20 hours of overtime per week to meet your needs. You still, however, want that employee to earn to same effective rate of $13.00 per week, so you reduce the employee's straight-time hourly rate of $11.15. When the need to work overtime ends, you then return the employee to the original $13.00 rate. Is the reduction of the employee's base hourly rate legal under the Fair Labor Standards Act?
According to the 11th Circuit in Thompson v. Regions Security Services, the answer is "not unless you want a jury to decide the legality of your pay practices under the FLSA."
We hold that, for a district court to facilitate notice of an FLSA suit to other employees, the plaintiffs must show a "strong likelihood" that those employees are similarly situated to the plaintiffs themselves. That standard requires a showing greater than the one necessary to create a genuine issue of fact, but less than the one necessary to show a preponderance. The strong-likelihood standard is familiar to the district courts; it would confine the issuance of court-approved notice, to the extent practicable, to employees who are in fact similarly situated; and it would strike the same balance that courts have long struck in analogous circumstances.
With those words, the 6th Circuit ended decades of uncertainty in Fair Labor Standards Act wage and hour collective action lawsuits in my Circuit on the issue of when in such a lawsuit a district court should determine which employees properly belong in the the class.
As the weather warms up around the country and spring quickly transitions to summer, festival season will begin … including my personal favorite, the beer festival.
Beer festivals, however, raise a few specific wage and hour traps for participating breweries. Here's the 411.
Bar Vegan in an affiliate of Slutty Vegan, a plant-based restaurant chain that finds itself in the crosshairs of a wage-and-hour collective action lawsuit challenging how it pays its tipped employees. The issue focuses on the bar claiming a tip credit and paying its tipped bartenders less than the statutory minimum wage. That practice, in and of itself, is legal. What makes it allegedly illegal in this case, however, is how Bar Vegan distributes tips among its staff, and more specifically that it permits non-tipped employees to participate in a tip pool with its tipped bartenders.
That's an FLSA no-no.
Ohio's Senate recently passed legislation that, if signed into law, would make it easier for businesses to employ 14- and 15-year-old children. SB 30 would amend Ohio's current child labor laws to permit 14- and 15-year-olds to work later than 7 pm during the school term with "approval to do so from the person's parent or legal guardian."
According to State Sen. Tim Shaffer, a Fairfield County Republican, he sponsored the bill to help solve Covid-related workforce shortages, in addition to teaching teens necessary work skills: "Learning how to show up on time, learning how to follow direction and execute commands and execute missions — I know at that age it was critically important for me. And this will certainly help employers across Ohio with their staffing problems as well."
Every 10 minutes at some random point that she couldn't anticipate, the company took photos of her and her work, a screenshot of whatever she was working on, and a photo of her face. And they were doing that to verify whether or not she was working.… The company was using that to pay Carol and the other workers only for the minutes when they appeared active.
If she was clicking away at a spreadsheet, doing demonstrable work, she was fine. She would be paid for that 10-minute increment. But as soon as she got a cup of coffee or answered the doorbell or went to the bathroom, she risked not being paid for that time.…
[E]ven if she had worked for 9 and 1/2 minutes out of 10 minutes, if that screenshot showed her inactive, if she was gone or distracted for that 30 seconds, she wouldn't be paid for that increment.
