Articles Tagged with FLSA

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A legal decision upholding the rights of workers at Tyson Foods pork processing plants came under fire recently as Tyson filed a petition to have a $5.8 million judgment overturned. The judgment was initially awarded following a case in U.S. District Court that found workers at a plant in Iowa had not been properly compensated for the time it takes to sanitize equipment when their shifts end, nor the time involved in putting on and taking off protective gear required for working at the plant.

At the time the case was filed, Tyson paid workers an additional four to seven minutes’ pay each day for these activities, but workers said the time actually used in performing the activities was much greater – sometimes as much as 30 minutes. Tyson responded by increasing the extra pay to 20 to 22 minutes’ extra pay for each shift for its hourly employees.

The workers’ legal team countered by claiming Tyson violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as well as state laws by neglecting to pay overtime for actual time worked, and the class action suit was filed and won.

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The U.S. Department of Labor has filed a lawsuit against the owners of two restaurants in Ames, Iowa, alleging they failed to pay workers the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour as well as additional payments for overtime as required by law.

The suit lists nearly $600,000 in damages for the wages it says are owed to the workers at both Mongolian Buffet and the now-defunct King Buffet. Both restaurants were owned by Li Ying Li and Jian Yum Zheng, a husband and wife who are both named in the lawsuit.

According to the suit, which was filed in late April, both servers and kitchen employees at the two restaurants were expected to work 72 hours per week. Some of the employees received fixed weekly wages of $450, which works out to $6.25 per hour.

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Our New York wage and hour attorneys strive to pay attention to trends in the labor market not only to help our clients understand their situations in context but also to measure the fundamental forces driving employers to raise wages or, conversely, to withhold wages and tips from workers.

To that end, we were fascinated by a powerful New York Times editorial from early December: “Employers Will Have To Raise Wages. They Just Don’t Know It Yet.”

The piece includes some seriously head scratching data from the Labor Department. Reports from October 2014 found that employers had been trying to fill nearly 5 million job vacancies. Curiously, though, the unemployment rate has stagnated; it remains relatively high at 5.8%, and that figure doesn’t even take into account the veritable army of freelancers and under-employed laborers who fly under the radar of these types of statistical analyses.

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Our New York employment attorneys have witnessed the awful impact of wage cuts and lower salaries on working conditions and employee morale. But what happens when wages go up — when hourly rates are raised on a city, state, or federal level? It’s easy to see how wage hikes work out well for employees. But can wage hikes also benefit business owners and employers?

Our answer is an emphatic yes. Here are five ways that wage hikes benefit everyone:

1.    Security and loyalty. Employees who have one well-paying job don’t need to constantly search for better employment. They don’t need to be working second jobs to make ends meet, leaving them exhausted and distracted at work. A well-paid employee has no incentive to go elsewhere and plenty of incentive to keep performance quality high.

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