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Time spent by employees in meal and other breaks continues to prompt litigation against public and private sector employers. In a recent decision, the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that corrections officers at a Pennsylvania prison failed to allege a violation of the FLSA by challenging the County’s failure to compensate them…

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…

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…

Letting stand a decision of the Court of Appeals of the Sixth Circuit, the Supreme Court has denied review of an emergency room nurse’s claim for overtime based on work allegedly performed during unpaid meal breaks. White v. Baptist Mem’l Health Care Corp., U.S., No. 13-107, cert. denied 10/7/13. Plaintiff urged the Supreme Court to…

As discussed repeatedly in these pages and elsewhere, employers have faced innumerable lawsuits regarding their alleged failure to distribute amounts purported to be gratuities to service staff in their entirety. However, even distributing tip money dollar-for-dollar to service providers is not a panacea against wage claims, as highlighted in a new opinion issuing from the…

In this post, we discussed two different courts’ analyses of hospital plaintiffs’ attempts to seek conditional certification of their claims that they were not paid for allegedly working meal periods due to the employers’ use of an auto-deduct for meal periods. In an opinion addressing such a claim on the merits (as opposed to the…