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 rampant injustice plaguing manual laborers compelled New Orleans City Council President Arnie Fielkow to promote an ordinance that would make wage theft a criminal act. Fielkow announced his support of the measure on the steps of City Hall.

Research conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Alabama, revealed that laborers in New Orleans suffered more from wage theft and other forms of abuse than anywhere else in the Southeastern U.S.

The SPLC report – Under Siege: Life for Low-Income Latinos in the South, “documents the human toll of failed policies that relegate millions of people to an underground economy, where they are beyond the protection of the law,” said Mary Bauer, author of the report and director of the SPLC’s Immigrant Justice Project.

“Workplace abuses and racial profiling are rampant in the South,” Bauer said.

According to the Times-Picayune, Councilman Fielkow promised to hold hearings on the issue of wage theft later this month. Fielkow also added that he has a panel of legal experts reviewing current laws to see how they can be improved, saying he seeks an ordinance “with teeth.”

Unless they are somehow connected to an advocacy group, many Latino workers in New Orleans have little to no recourse in recovering stolen wages. Workers who complain to authorities are often reported to immigration officials.

The Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor is in charge of enforcing Fair Labor Standards laws, including cracking down on wage theft. However, last year, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Wage and Hour Division’s enforcement of FLSA laws dropped to record lows in the past decade.

Most abused by employers were FLSA regulations guaranteeing minimum wage and overtime compensation. Abuse of the laws grew while enforcement of the laws shrank, creating what wage theft activist Kim Bobo called a “national crisis at this moment in our nation” to the tune of $19 billion per year in unpaid overtime alone.

Interfaith Worker Justice, a worker advocacy organization founded by Bobo, held its annual 2009 Leadership Summit at Tulane University in New Orleans earlier this week. Highlights of the 3-day program included seminars devoted to faith and labor laws, immigration issues, and the wage theft crisis.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › New Orleans is ‘Ground Zero’ of national wage theft epidemic

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

In March, Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis announced her intentions to revamp and empower the Wage and Hour Division, saying that she would increase the Division’s staff size by a third in an effort to “refocus the agency on [its] enforcement responsibilities.” The addition of new field investigators, she said, “will reinvigorate the work of this important agency, which has suffered a loss of experienced personnel over the last several years.”

Last year, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Wage and Hour Division’s enforcement of FLSA laws dropped to record lows under the Bush Administration. Most abused by employers were FLSA regulations guaranteeing minimum wage and overtime compensation. Abuse of the laws grew while enforcement of the laws shrank, creating what wage theft activist Kim Bobo called a “national crisis at this moment in our nation” to the tune of $19 billion per year in unpaid overtime alone.

Bobo, who is the founder and executive director of the Interfaith Worker Justice program, supported the GAO investigators in their findings. “The wage and hour division is so understaffed,” Bobo said, “that it is actually now doing fewer investigations of wage and hour complaints than it did in 1941, the year it was founded. Wages are simply being stolen.”

The appointment of Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor is as symbolic as it is significant, and promises to bring about change for workers who have endured workplace abuse for years. The daughter of immigrants from Nicaragua and Mexico, Solis is both personally and professionally familiar with the plight of the working class, and particularly the struggles of the working class immigrant.

“The U.S. Department of Labor is the voice for working families, and I am dedicated to ensuring compliance with federal labor laws to both strengthen our economy and protect workers in this country,” Solis said.

Sources: http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/media/press/whdpressVB3.asp?pressdoc=national/20090305.xml

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/13416/

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR34.3/maclean.php

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › Solis works to revamp and empower Wage and Hour Division

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

Smith’s restaurant in Bolivar will pay more than $36,000 in fines and back wages stemming from its violations of the FLSA’s overtime, minimum wage, and child labor regulations. $34,625 of the money recovered by the Wage and Hour Division will compensate 54 employees for back wages.

Investigators found the restaurant had violated minimum wage laws by skimming money from the servers’ hourly pay to compensate bus staff. The restaurant also paid regular wages to ten hourly employees for time worked over 40 hours per workweek, which constitutes a violation of the FLSA standards for overtime pay.

The restaurant had to pay nearly $1,500 in penalties to the Labor Department for allowing employees under 18 years old to work more than three hours on school days and past 9 p.m. during the summer.  The FLSA prohibits workers under age 18 from working more than three hours on school days (18 hours per week) and eight hours on days with no school (40 hours per week). Minors may not work work later than 7 p.m. when school is in session or 9 p.m. during summer break.

The restaurant has cooperated fully with the Department of Labor, reports the Bolivar Herald-Free Press.

“The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division is committed to protecting the rights of workers by ensuring that they receive the wages to which they are entitled,” James Koren, Kansas City district director of the Wage and Hour Division, told the Bolivar Herald-Free Press.

“Also, the department’s child labor provisions serve to strike a balance among providing invaluable work experience to our nation’s youth, safety and educational responsibilities,” he said.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › Missouri restaurant pays back wages and penalties for FLSA violations

According to the Palm Beach Post, the plaintiffs alleged that the club “operated an illegal tip pool knowingly” and with “reckless disregard for the law.” Despite their courtroom victory, however, the plaintiffs failed to persuade the jury of those counts.

An attorney for the poker dealers told the Palm Beach Post that a federal judge will determine how much back pay will be awarded to each dealer, estimating that the total amount would reach $130,000 plus attorney’s fees. Most of the plaintiffs are no longer employed at the Kennel Club.

The ruling will likely boost earnings for card dealers in other Florida clubs where money is commonly skimmed from card dealer tips to pay floor supervisors. According to the plantiffs’ attorney, some dealers could go from making $40,000 to $70,000 with full tips.

The attorney told the Post that the club was “stealing the wages that somebody earned. Period. So their bottom line wouldn’t be affected.”

“They were taking from somebody without them knowing it and giving it to somebody who didn’t deserve it,” he told the Post.

Federal labor regulations allow businesses to pay employees less than minimum wage if the employees “customarily and regularly receive tips.” Attorneys representing the dealers successfully argued that because the club paid dealers $3 below the minimum wage, it shouldn’t have claimed tips to compensate supervisors “who had no direct service contact with the public.”

The Palm Beach Kennel Club is an established dog racing track dating back to 1932. The club also offers simulcast racing, a poker room, and dining options.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › Card dealers win labor case against Palm Beach club

Bobo is the founder and executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, an organization that appeals to the shared convictions of all religions in protecting the rights of the everyday worker, especially low-wage workers.

Bobo alleges that in meat processing plants, retail businesses, restaurants, garment assembly plants, the construction industry, and several other occupational settings, “workers are having their legal wages stolen by unscrupulous employers trying to gain an advantage over their law abiding competitors.”

In 1996, Bobo established the national Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) organization, having spent many years previously advocating for worker justice. Since its founding, IWJ has grown into a network of more than 50 religious labor groups and 20 worker centers. In 2007, the organization’s worker centers scattered throughout the country recovered $1,249,052 in wages for workers.

The organization also funds and operates numerous programs, including one that pairs seminary and rabbinical students with labor unions. “Too often the religious community and the labor communities have worked in isolation from one another,” the IWJ website states.

Raising awareness of wage theft is a formidable task, but it can be tackled effectively with the power of faith-based conscience. Bringing attention to the problem of unethical corporate practices is like shining a spotlight in a dark basement where creepy things lurk.

Bobo’s new book, Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Americans Are Not Getting Paid – And What We Can Do About It, is another way that the activist is shining light on the “crime wave no one talks about.” According to Bobo, between two and three million people are paid less than minimum wage for their work every year. Misclassifying employees as independent contractors is also a trick many companies use to avoid payroll taxes and overtime pay.

IWJ’s website provides a wealth of information and resources pertaining to workers’ rights and the issue of wage theft, including an expanded definition of the term and answers to many questions about the problem. Some interesting facts surrounding wage theft, borrowed from IWJ’s website, are listed below.

• Wage theft covers a variety of infractions that occur when workers do not receive their legally or contractually promised wages.
• Wage theft consists of employer violations of the Davis-Bacon Act, Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and Housing and Urban Development Act Section 3.
• Wage theft is endemic across the labor market, and especially in the low wage labor market.
• 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.
• The number of Department of Labor (DOL) wage and hour investigators dropped by 14 percent between 1975 and 2004.
• The number of compliance actions declined 36 percent in that time.
• The workforce covered by the FLSA grew 55 percent in that time.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › Woman crusades against epidemic of wage theft

Ramales is one of many who are suing companies over unfair compensation of the amount overtime worked. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires overtime to be paid to employees who work over the amount of hours prescribed in a week, which is usually 40 hours. Once an employee works more than his or her prescribed hours in a week, they should be compensated at time and one-half.

The FLSA was designed to help and protect employees from exploitation from their employers. However, employees are still being exploited by companies finding ways to get around paying overtime. Everybody is being hit hard by the failing economy, from big business to small businesses, but there is no excuse for companies to not compensate work that is earned.

One of the ways companies are getting around the rules of the FLSA is by giving employees the title of “manager.” The employees promoted to the title of “manager” are performing the same duties as hourly-paid workers and putting in the same amount of hours, yet on salary. At the end of the day, the salary that these “managers” are making is less than what they would be making at an hourly wage with time and a half overtime.

Beasley Allen has seen numerous cases in retail stores dealing with misclassifying of the “management” positions. But that is not the only industry that employes this tactic. Others include auto repair stores, service industry jobs, convenient stores and restaurant chains.

If you have been promoted to a “management” position and feel that you are still doing the same job and hours as just an employee, you might be an employee that has been wronged by your company. Research and get more detailed information at www.fairlabor-legal.com. You have rights and the privilege to get the pay you deserve.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › Timberlake employee among growing number of FLSA abuses

Because of the diverse nature of the American workforce, there is special consideration given to various groups such as children working on farms. Selected terms were given for people in executive and administrative positions as well as thousands of other special cases who are able to claim exemptions to FLSA regulations.

In August 2004 the most important change to FLSA came about. Lawmakers decided to amend the document and clearly establish which jobs are exempt from overtime and which jobs are not. As a result, millions of Americans who were once eligible for overtime pay had now been ‘reclassified’ into administrative, professional and executive categories which disqualified them for their overtime pay.

Hard working Americans deserve respect for their contributions to society and should be entitled to fair and just compensation for their labors. If you or a loved one has been a victim of oversight, negligence or deceit in the workplace it is important that you contact an experienced FLSA lawyer immediately. FLSA litigation can be confusing and time consuming, and only a professional FLSA attorney will be able to get you the compensation you deserve.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › FLSA lawyers-fair labor standards attorney and lawsuits

Brown is an agent for LiveOps, a company based in Palo Alto, Calif., with a national network of 16,000 operators who work from home answering the phone for TV infomercials.

Brown, who lives in Houston, works in her pajamas and never knows what she’ll be selling until the script pops up on her computer screen.

“You have to learn to be relaxed,” Brown said.

LiveOps is on a hiring spree, ramping up to handle all the calls for exercise machines and diet plans from viewers trying to live up to their New Year’s resolutions.

LiveOps would like to add 200 agents to the 180 who are already working in Houston, said Tim Whipple, vice president of the virtual call center, whose clients include the sellers of Ronco knives and rotisserie ovens, Hip Hop Abs fitness program, WalkFit shoe inserts and the Whitney Education Group’s program on foreclosure investing.

LiveOps also handles the calls for 1-800-Flowers.com and Pizza Hut, he said.

The work-at-home model works well for the company, which must staff up when its customers are in the buying mood — and that often occurs in the middle of the night.

The sophisticated shift-scheduling program it uses can also handle huge short-term spikes such as pizza orders during the Super Bowl, Whipple said.

It’s also an attractive model for the many stay-at-home moms — and some dads — who want to pocket extra cash.

“It’s been the best thing that ever happened,” said Brown, who has a degree in marketing.

She has four children, ages 2, 3, 7 and 10, and wanted a way to supplement her husband’s salary as a middle school teacher.

Day care is expensive, Brown said, so she wanted a job that she could do when her children sleep and her husband is at home. A friend told her about LiveOps.

As a telephone agent, Brown picks her own schedule once a week. She often signs on at 9 p.m. and works for several hours. And there’s no commute.

Brown said she earns between $12 and $14 an hour and that she works about 20 hours a week. She has to provide — at her expense — a dedicated phone line, phone, a computer and high-speed Internet access.

She only earns money when she’s on the phone, which Whipple said is roughly 25 cents a minute plus any commissions.

The number of calls routed to Brown and other agents depend on their selling skills and ability to sell up — selling extra items callers agree to buy after listening to the agent’s sales pitch — as well as their speed. The better you do, the more calls you get.

When there is a lull between the calls, Brown said she watches movies or pays bills.

Not for everyone

However, the job may not be for everyone. That’s because agents aren’t paid for the time they spend waiting for calls and training, including watching the infomercials.

LifeOps treats its agents as independent contractors rather than employees, Whipple said, which means they don’t receive overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours a week. While agents can earn as much as $20 an hour, the average is more like $8 to $12 an hour, he said.

But a recently filed lawsuit by two agents in Georgia contends they don’t even earn the minimum wage when their training time and nonpaid downtime between calls are factored in. The two women argue they’re employees — not independent contractors — and are entitled to minimum wage and overtime pay.

The federal court rules in the Southern District of Georgia discourages attorney comment on pending litigation, said Mark Johnson, a lawyer with Gilbert, Harrell, Sumerford & Martin in Brunswick, Ga., who is representing the two women.

LiveOps spokeswoman Elizabeth Gordon said the company had no comment.

No office policies

Rose Johnson Branch, who is not a part of the lawsuit, estimates that she works 50 hours a week as a LiveOps agent in Houston, fielding infomercial calls as well as pizza orders from all over the country.

Branch said she typically earns between $15 and $20 an hour with LiveOps, depending on bonuses.

“The phone doesn’t stay idle much,” she said, crediting her experience and picking up every call with a smile in her voice. And there’s no office politics.

“In corporations, there are certain politics to play to get promotions,” she said. “The system has no idea you are in your pajamas. It just knows a lot of orders, a lot of up-sales. It’s a very nondiscriminatory system, and I love it.”

SOURCE: They pitch sales in their pajamas, by L.M. Sixel, Houston Chronicle

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › They pitch sales in their pajamas