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Three former Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company employees who filed a $200-million class-action lawsuit against the company claim they were deprived of minimum wages and overtime pay. The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit in federal court in San Diego, alleging Northwest Mutual misclassified them and hundreds of other employees as independent contractors to save money.
Hurricane Katrina, a powerful storm surge, and a system of inadequate levies teamed up in 2005 to create an unprecedented level of disaster in the United States. In the wake that followed, New Orleans (along with many other coastal communities in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) resembled a sea of destruction. New Orleans relied heavily on day laborers to clean up, repair, and rebuild. Sadly, however, recent surveys found that 80% of the Hispanic workers had been cheated out of compensation.
The Times Union of Saratoga, New York, published an editorial calling attention to a bill that has stalled in the New York legislature as the state’s Senate fights over which party leads the chamber. The Farmworkers Omnibus Labor Standards Bill seeks to secure some of the most basic labor rights to migrant laborers and other agricultural workers – rights that have protected workers in other industries since the Fair Labor Standards Act established a 40-hour work week and a minimum wage more than 70 years ago.
The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, under which the Fair Labor Standards Act came into existence in 1938 as part of a nationwide effort to protect working class citizens from corporate exploitation and abuse, may be on the mend after an long era of being little more than a bureaucratic entity.
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.
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.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division has cited a Missouri restaurant with numerous violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, according to a report in the Bolivar Herald-Free Press.
A group of poker dealers in Palm Beach, Florida won a lawsuit in federal court this week filed against the Palm Beach Kennel Club Entertainment Complex for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The workers alleged that managers of the club skimmed money off their tips to pay supervisors working the card room floor. According to the Palm Beach Post, the club failed to prove to the jury that it operated a legal tip pool under the FLSA regulations.
Kim Bobo believes that employers in the United States are stealing from their workers. Not just nickels and dimes and not just in isolated incidents. She claims that the theft is rampant — that it has become a “national crisis at this moment in our nation” to the tune of $19 billion per year in unpaid overtime alone.
Working for Justin Timberlake’s posh “Southern Hospitality” does not exempt you from unfair treatment and pay. According to an article from Fox News, the former Southern Hospitality bus boy, Felipe Ramales, filed a lawsuit against Timberlake’s restaurant for not compensating him for the overtime he accumulated while there. “Southern Hospitality” is not the first to be sued over overtime hours, and it certainly won’t be the last.
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