Milwaukee-based Northwestern Mutual denies the allegations, pointing to a similar trial it was involved in last year. In that case, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled in favor of Northwestern Mutual, saying it had the right to retain certain employees as independent contractors.

The plaintiffs named in the San Diego lawsuit contend that they had little to no autonomy and decision making capabilities. They also allege that they had to work more than eight hours per day and more than 40 hours per week without overtime. All three plaintiffs were employed as financial representatives of Northwestern Mutual, two of them in California and the other in Georgia.

In addition to financial compensation, the plaintiffs also seek the reclassification of hundreds of former and current Northwestern Mutual representatives from independent contractors to full-time employees.

Because the Fair Labor Standards Act extends only to company employees, some corporations will classify employees as independent contractors to avoid FLSA rules and save money. Corporations that classify employees as independent contractors not only avoid paying minimum wage and overtime, they also avoid paying state and federal taxes on those “exempt” employees.

Through its independently owned agencies, Northwestern Mutual employs approximately 7,000 financial representatives in the U.S. The company provides insurance, annuities, mutual funds, and, ironically, employee benefit services.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › Northwestern Mutual reps sue company for FLSA violations

The proposed labor bill would establish a standard 8-hour work day for agricultural workers. Employers would pay workers overtime for all hours worked in excess of 8 hours. Additionally, workers would be entitled to enjoy one day of rest per week during the harvest season, they would be permitted to form unions, and they would have access to workers’ compensation and unemployment benefits.

Employers would also have to meet basic health standards in the living and working conditions they provide to laborers.

In a perfect world, such laws would be unnecessary because employers could always be counted on to look after their employees and treat them fairly and ethically.

Unfortunately, the health and well-being of workers often comes last, and laborers desperate for work are often easily exploited by their employers. The economic downturn has exacerbated the tendency to exploit, amounting to what activist Kim Bobo calls an “epidemic of wage theft” in America and “a crime wave no one talks about.”

Bobo, who founded the watchdog organization Interfaith Worker Justice, says that “agriculture, poultry processing, janitorial services, restaurant work, garment manufacturing, long term care, home health care and retail are the industries with the most reported cases of wage theft” in the United States.

Still, some New York farmers worry that the bill would hurt farms on many different levels, from raising production costs to losing a competitive edge.

The Times Union, however, says these arguments are merely theoretical  and that other states have successfully implemented similar labor laws.

“New York cannot let such speculative arguments justify underpaying and overworking people and denying them at least a day of rest. We share the view of many advocates that the perceived harms are being greatly overstated, and that the industry and the consumer will absorb the costs as they have in other states such as California,” the Times Union said.

Even the most basic standards, the Times Union points out, “have been under assault for years. The last time the minimum wage was high enough to keep a person who worked 40 hours a week out of poverty was the early 1980s.”

The editorial also noted that earlier in the decade, some lawmakers on Capitol Hill pushed for a 50-hour work week before overtime kicked in.

“It is troubling enough at any time to have lawmakers debate whether only some people should have the same protections from what amounts to exploitation, intentional or not, as others,” the Times Union said.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › New York bill to protect farm laborers stalls

Then, last week, after finding the company and its owners to be in contempt for not paying the damages as ordered in the 2007 ruling, a federal judge smacked the cleaning company with another $277,791 in post-judgment interest, calculated at 4.44 percent from the original summary judgment’s date. Additionally, the judge ordered fines of $2,000 per day against the cleaning company and $200 each per day against Maldonado and Rubio for every day the back wages aren’t paid in full.

A district office of the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division in West Covina, Cal., first heard complaints about the way the cleaning company treated its employees when it took part in the Employment Education and Outreach (EMPLEO) – a coalition of private organizations and government agencies that helps Hispanic workers and employers with labor issues and concerns.

An investigation by the DOL turned up multiple minimum wage and overtime violations. Additionally, company managers did not keep accurate records of employee hours worked.

“The Department of Labor will not hesitate to take action to ensure workers receive the compensation they have worked hard for and earned,” U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said in a statement last Thursday.

Solis, who was born in California to immigrant working class parents from Nicaragua and Mexico, was named as the Plaintiff in the case, filed in July 2006 in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

Speaking at the Forum of the Workers of the Americas in Trinidad, Solis suggested her agency would finally be able to ramp up its investigations of companies that treat their employees unfairly and illegally.

Solis served eight years in Congress during the Bush Administration before President Obama nominated her as Labor Secretary. She told the assembly in Trinidad that she had battled injustice for too long. “For eight years I have struggled under hardship in an administration that was not for, in my opinion, putting people – working class people – first. That did not put education first,” Solis said.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › California maid company fined for ignoring 2007 ruling

According to the GAO report, the WHD “frequently responded inadequately to complaints, leaving low wage workers vulnerable to wage theft.” The GAO came to this conclusion after conducting a broad undercover investigation in which it filed 10 fictitious worker complaints in WHD district offices throughout the country.

“The undercover tests revealed sluggish response times, a poor complaint intake process, and failed conciliation attempts, among other problems,” the report states. The GAO also documented one case in which a WHD employee lied about investigating a claim when actually no work at all was done to investigate the fictitious claim.

One of the investigations was filed by a fictitious secretary in Virginia who complained that she was not being paid the minimum wage. The GAO’s fictitious employer did not refute the receptionist’s claim, but refused to pay the back wages owed anyway. The WHD investigator “accepted the refusal without question and informed the fictitious employee of his right to file a lawsuit.” The fictitious employee then asked why the WHD couldn’t be of more help and was told to contact his Congressman.

Another fictitious claim stated that children were using heavy machinery at a California meat packing facility. But 4 months later, the WHD still had not taken any action. In fact, the complaint was never recorded in the WHD’s database, even though the WDH claims that child labor complaints are its top priority.

It’s bad enough the workers in labor intensive jobs often find themselves preyed upon by unscrupulous employers. Add to that a bad economy in which some employers take desperate (and illegal) cost-cutting measures and top it off with an ineffective government bureaucracy, and you have to wonder:  why does the Fair Labor Standards Act exist if our Department of Labor won’t take even the smallest measures to enforce it? What recourse do workers have?

At the end of its undercover study, the GAO was still waiting for the WHD to begin investigating 3 of the fictitious claims, all of which had been delayed by months. During the course of the study, the GAO also exposed many real cases involving hundreds of workers whose employers the WHD never investigated.

According to the report, the “GAO found cases where it took over a year for WHD to respond to a complaint, cases closed based on unverified information provided by the employer, and cases dropped when the employer did not return phone calls.”

“GAO’s overall assessment of the WHD complaint intake, conciliation, and investigation processes found an ineffective system that discourages wage theft complaints,” the report states.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › Department of Labor fails to uphold and enforce FLSA regulations

The store managers, represented in the class action lawsuit Stillman v. Staples, Inc., charged the retail giant with violating the law when it classified them as exempt and then failed to pay them for overtime. The jury agreed with the plaintiffs and found that Staples had acted willfully in breaking the law. The verdict came after a six-week trial. The amount awarded does not include attorneys’ fees and costs, which the plaintiffs may claim pursuant to FLSA laws.

Staples spokesman Paul Capelli said that the company may appeal the jury’s decision. “We firmly believe that we’re fully compliant with the law,” he said.

The lawsuit was one of many collective and class action lawsuits alleging the misclassification of store managers have been filed against Staples. It was also not the first suit filed against Staples for violations of the FLSA. In November 2007, Staples settled a class-action lawsuit in California for $38 million. That suit related to the classification of assistant managers by Staples stores in California and the retail chain’s failure to compensate the managers for overtime work.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › Jury sides with plaintiffs in Staples class action lawsuit