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

If a group of Brazilian workers is believed, some U.S. companies are still practicing a form of indentured servitude. According to a lawsuit filed in U.S. Distrcit Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, a group of Brazilian welders and pipefitters came to the U.S. as temporary H-2B guest workers for American recruiters that provide workers for shipyards. According to the suit, the workers came to this country “on promises of consistent, well compensated work at a reputable shipyard through a regulated U.S. government program.”

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Violating the rules of employment set forth in the Fair Labor Standards Act can be an expensive way to do business. In August of 2007, a federal judge in the U.S. Central District Court for California in Santa Ana ordered Southern California Maid Services Inc. to pay nearly $3.5 million in back wages and another $1 million in liquidated damages to 385 of its employees. The court ruled that by improperly classifying their workers as independent contractors, Sergio Maldonado and Lorenza Rubio, the company owners, avoided paying minimum wage and overtime, which the FLSA requires.

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If you’re a wage worker and your employer is violating the Federal Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by paying you less than minimum wage, denying you overtime, or misclassifying you as a manager or independent contractor, don’t go running to the Department of Labor (DOL) for help anytime soon. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) is incompetent. What’s worse, the latest report, released on March 29, represents the third time in less than a year that the GAO has found the Wage and Hour Division’s performance a failure when it came to enforcing FLSA regulations and helping the people it was designed to serve.

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Talk about irony. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) – an advocate of workplace fairness – has been willfully violating the Fair Labor Standards Act for several years, according to a report in the Washington Post. An arbitrator has decided that the EEOC unfairly and illegally gave compensatory time off instead of overtime pay to its employees throughout the country. The arbitrator said this system amounted to “forced volunteering.”

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An attorney representing a healthcare worker who is suing his employer for denied overtime says that lawsuits filed under the Fair Labor Standards Act may become more common during the economic recession. The plaintiff alleges that his employer, Delta-T Group and Delta-T Group Social Service Staffing, Inc. denied him overtime compensation by wrongly classifying him as an independent contractor. Because he is not appropriately classified as an employee of the company, the plaintiff cannot receive the same benefits that regular employees of the company received.

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