The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is the federal law which, generally, regulates minimum wage and overtime that employers must provide to employees. Statutes of limitations set the time periods in which a lawsuit must be filed. For the FLSA, the statute of limitations is either two years or three years, depending on whether the violation was willful or not. Today’s Long Island employment law blog discusses a recent appellate court decision concerning willfulness in FLSA cases.
In Whiteside v. Hover-Davis, Inc., the plaintiff worked for the defendant corporation as a “Quality Engineer.” The company classified the plaintiff as a salaried employee exempt from overtime. But, after almost a decade, the company transferred the plaintiff to a different position with different responsibilities. The company continued to pay the plaintiff via a salary, even though other workers with the same title were paid hourly and the worker who the plaintiff replaced had been paid via a salary.
In the new position, the plaintiff worked 45 to 50 hours per week, for four years. Although the FLSA requires that employers pay workers an overtime premium for all hours worked over 40 in a week, the plaintiff’s employer did not pay him overtime. On January 8, 2019, the worker filed a lawsuit alleging a number of claims, including that he was not paid properly under the FLSA and the New York Labor Law.