“French officials have fined a pub in Brittany €9,000 for “undeclared labour” after a customer returned some empty glasses to the bar. For customers at the Mamm-Kounifl concert-café in Locmiquélic, carrying drinks trays and used glasses back to the bar was a polite tradition.” [Independent]
Posts Tagged ‘wage and hour suits’
Employers mull email curfews
Why would an employer adopt a rule forbidding employees from using company email after hours or on weekends? Simple enough: lawyers have been busily organizing class actions alleging that employees are owed millions for overtime spent on such tasks. And it doesn’t matter whether the employee wants to do his or her job that way or is responding to an emergency customer request: the legal entitlement to sue isn’t ordinarily waivable by consent. Hence “email curfews.” [Brianne Pfannenstiel, Kansas City Business Journal via Jon Hyman]
“Federal workers sue government post-shutdown”
“Even though they received back-pay, they are now suing the government….Their attorney said that late payment violates the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act and they’re now owed damages – adding up to hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars per worker.” [Mike Conneen, WJLA]
Labor and employment roundup
- Reminder: Second Amendment rights run against the government, not against your employer or other private parties [Eugene Volokh]
- Invasion of privacy? Employees continue to win awards and settlements by way of surreptitious recording devices in workplace [Jon Hyman]
- Gov. Brown signs bill creating overtime entitlement for California nannies, private health aides [Reuters, L.A. Times]
- Does rolling back a benefit under a public employee pension plan violate the Contracts Clause? [Alexander Volokh, Reason Foundation]
- Even as anti-bullying programs backfire, some propose extending them to workplace [Hans Bader, CEI, earlier]
- Background on Harris v. Quinn, SCOTUS case on herding family home carers into union fee arrangements [Illinois Review, earlier]
- “California unions target business-friendly Dems” [Steve Malanga]
Great moments in wage and hour litigation: unpaid Yelp reviewers
“A class action lawsuit has been launched by a small group of Yelp reviewers, trying to make the (laughable and ridiculous) case that reviewers on the site are actually unpaid employees who are now demanding compensation. It appears that they’re hoping the recent success of a few lawsuits involving ‘unpaid internships’ will now carry over to user-generated content sites as well. To put it mildly, this is incredibly stupid.” [Mike Masnick, TechDirt]
Overtime for live-in health companions, cont’d
Caleb Brown interviews me for a Cato podcast on the Administration’s new home-companion overtime rules, which could drive many elderly and disabled persons into nursing homes. Earlier here and here.
Department of Labor: at-home companions must be paid overtime
Had you heard that disabled-rights activists have staged demonstrations in Washington, D.C. to protest a new Obama administration initiative? Not only that, but the disabled-rights activists are right.
At issue is an awful scheme by the Obama Labor Department, newly headed by Secretary Thomas Perez, to abolish most of the “companionship exemption” to federal wage and hour laws, which has up to now reasonably recognized that serving as a live-in or semi-live-in paid attendant to a sick, elderly or disabled person is not really the same sort of thing as working twelve-hour days on a factory assembly line. I’ve got a new post at Cato at Liberty looking at some of the consequences we can expect from making it far more expensive to provide a kind of round-the-clock care that often keeps people out of nursing homes. More: Bloomberg.
Some background on the controversy, beyond the links in the Cato post: National Council on Disability (a federal disability-advocacy agency that was not entirely prepared to toe the line in favor of the new regs); Stephen Miller, Society for Human Resource Management; Kaiser Health News; Disability Law (“disability rights groups… fear that substantially raising the cost of personal assistance services without increasing Medicaid reimbursements will force people with disabilities into nursing homes”); PHI and Direct Care Alliance (promoting regs); National Association for Home Care and Hospice and more (commercial group opposed); ADAPT (disability rights group opposed).
More reactions: Bill McMorris/Free Beacon, Jon Hyman, Trey Kovacs/Workplace Choice.
Starbucks’ way of discouraging class actions?
Insist that class counsel’s attorneys’ fees be handled separately from the negotiation of relief to the class — and then don’t roll over for those fees the way defendants usually do. “They [Starbucks’ lawyers] contend that the $4.2 million request is ‘breathtakingly inflated,’ considering that class counsel managed to win certification of only one of 13 alleged subclasses [in a West Coast wage-hour class action].” [Alison Frankel, Reuters]
Labor and employment roundup
- “Will banning tips prevent lawsuits? Some restaurants give it a try” [ABA Journal]
- “CEOs Beware: You’re Now in the Crosshairs of a Wage and Hour Complaint Under FLSA” [Connecticut Employment Law Blog/Daniel Schwartz, who’s just switched law firms]
- “Court: First Amendment protections don’t allow unions to engage in nuisance lawsuits” [Sean Higgins, D.C. Examiner]
- Judge rules strippers at club are employees, not independent contractors as management claimed [NY Times]
- Judge strikes down new Indiana right-to-work law, appeal to Indiana Supreme Court expected [WXIN] Court (again) upholds Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 on public sector union bargaining [Wisconsin State Journal, Milwaukee Business Journal]
- 1973 SCOTUS case of U.S. v. Enmons carves out convenient exception in federal extortion law for labor unions [Mark Mix; David Kendrick, Cato 1998]
- “State Department Says Unionizing Its Foreign National Workers Would Threaten Security” [Government Executive]
Wage-and-hour law firm sued in wage-and-hour case
“In a federal lawsuit filed Aug. 29, Christopher Hranek contends Morgan & Morgan – one of the most active Florida law firms in filing wage and hour cases – misclassified him as a salaried employee when he was instead working as an hourly employee.” Morgan & Morgan, whose advertising slogan is “For the People,” said it does not owe Hranek overtime and expects to show documentation that it was in compliance with labor law. [Jane Meinhardt, Tampa Bay Business Journal]