Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

The Capital, a newspaper serving the Annapolis, Maryland area, recently ran an interesting article explaining how the Annapolis County school board has been violating the Fair Labor Standards Act for 30 years because it averaged pay for school secretaries rather than pay them specific hourly wages. The violation was discovered last year when school officials installed a new payroll system.

According to the FLSA, workers such as the school secretaries must be paid for the number of hours they work each week. Because some secretaries work fewer hours in the summer months, the county averaged their pay so that they would receive consistent checks throughout the year. The county stopped averaging the secretaries’ pay recently in order to comply with FLSA standards.

But the school secretaries’ union doesn’t like the change, which it claims is a violation of the secretaries’ employment contract. The union filed a lawsuit against the county in circuit court last December. The school board has asked the judge to dismiss the case.

An attorney for the school board told The Capital that the courts would likely side with the FLSA. “You can’t generally have a contract of any kind that goes against the law,” he told The Capital. “The law always trumps the contract language.”

Although the change doesn’t alter the secretaries’ total compensation, some advocates claim that it makes budgeting a lot more difficult. To steady any financial swings that FLSA compliance would create for the secretaries, the school board has offered to deposit a percent of each check into a savings account in an effort to mimic averaging their pay.

The union has a month to respond to the school board’s motion to dismiss the case.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 11:34 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.