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This month, two New York federal judges reviewing a claim of misclassification rejected a claim for overtime compensation, agreeing that a business properly classified two translators as independent contractors rather than as “employees” under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the New York Labor Law. See Mateo v. Universal Language Corp., 2015 U.S. Dist.…

Courts continue to wrestle with preemption issues, the tension between sweeping federal laws purporting to regulate an industry or industries and laws enacted at the local level, such as labor laws impacting labor costs. In the most recent example, the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit rejected a cargo airline’s argument that the Airline…

Cases challenging the independent contractor status of certain service providers under the wage-and-hour laws are likely to continue in the near future due to the difficulties in applying the law to complex factual patterns. The Department of Labor recently provided additional guidance for determining contractor status in the form of an Administrator’s Interpretation (and the…

The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit last week adopted the Second Circuit’s “primary beneficiary” test as the appropriate test for determining whether an unpaid clinical intern was truly an “employee” within the meaning of the FLSA. Schumann v. Collier Anesthesia, P.A., 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 16194 (11th Cir. 2015).

In rejecting the…

The best defense for employers confronted with claims of “off-the-clock”, (i.e., unrecorded) work under the FLSA are accurate contemporaneous time records created by employees based on clearly communicated time keeping practices. The effectiveness of such records was recently demonstrated in Roberts v. Advocate Health Care, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 103631 (N.D.…

As previously promised, the Department of Labor today issued its eighth Administrator’s Interpretation (“AI”) since the 2010 implementation of this form of guidance. Today’s Interpretation, as expected, reflects the current Department’s position that the governing analysis is the economic realities test which, in the Department’s view, is used to determine “whether the worker…

Litigation regarding the status of workers as independent contractors or employees continues to be a hotbed of litigation. This is true even in industries that have long-considered workers as independent contractors, such as real estate agents. Attorneys representing workers, for example, have turned to state statutes addressing independent contractor status to attempt to upset these…

Like interns, vocational students often provide some degree of service as part of their vocational program. For this reason, such arrangements are susceptible to the allegation that these services are compensable “work time” under the FLSA. While such allegations have been made in some recent cases, in the first handful of these to reach…