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Unionized employers often enter into agreements with employees regarding compensation for particular hours or break periods. These agreements are reached through bargaining for the mutual benefit of the employer and union members. At times, such agreements can potentially be in tension with Department of Labor regulations regarding hours of work and break periods. The Wisconsin…

Employers (and thus courts) continue to be confronted with private litigation and DOL rulemaking seeking to expand the scope of wage-and-hour liabilities, such as expanding the definition of employee, seeking to narrow the scope of a longstanding exemption or expanding the definition of what constitutes compensable work. Rejecting a claim based on the…

Hospitals and other medical service providers continue to face waves of wage-and-hour claims concerning meal break practices, with non-exempt care providers alleging that they were unable to take unpaid meal periods, or that those meal periods were otherwise compensable.  A new decision from Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania rejects…

The issue of whether time spent “on-call” is compensable under the Fair Labor Standards Act is a factual analysis, and thus the source of FLSA litigation.  A recent decision finding such time to be non-compensable highlights a preeminent principle in the analysis – in order for on-call time to be non-compensable, an employee must be…

In another setback for unionized non-exempt FLSA plaintiffs claiming as compensable time spent: 1) changing into work-related gear; and 2) traveling to their site of work from the changing point (typically in a production facility such as a factory or slaughterhouse), the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has ruled that U.S. Steel was…

Ascertaining the actual “hours worked” by a plaintiff alleging uncompensated working time is one of a factfinder’s most thankless tasks, requiring the judge or jury to apply prevailing law regarding what constitutes compensable “work” to conflicting testimony regarding when, where and how the plaintiff performed that work, and how much work the plaintiff performed. Such determinations…

The proliferation of FLSA lawsuits brought by “non-exempt” employees for alleged uncompensated working time has highlighted several important FLSA questions. One prominent and thorny question concerns when and how an employer is deemed to have constructive knowledge of work allegedly performed by an employee, such that the employer will be deemed to have “suffered or permitted&rdquo…

The Second Circuit recently affirmed a district court’s decision dismissing security guards’ claims for minimal amounts of allegedly uncompensated work time. In doing so, the Court reiteratedthe general principle applied by federal courts that “"[w]hen the matter in issue concerns only a few seconds or minutes of work beyond the scheduled working hours, such trifles may…