The Fair Labor Standards Act’s (FLSA) overtime provision requires that employers pay one and one-half times the employee’s regular rate of pay for all hours worked in excess of forty hours per week. When an employer violates the FLSA, affected employees may bring an action to recover not only the amount of their unpaid overtime compensation, but in addition, a successful employee is usually entitled to double the amount of unpaid back wages, called “liquidated damages.”
Lytle & Barszcz currently represents Hartford “Analysts” who allege violations of the FLSA. The crux of the Plaintiffs’ claims is that Hartford willfully misclassified them as exempt (not entitled to overtime) when in reality Hartford knew that the Plaintiffs were non-exempt (entitled to overtime pay). Specifically, that Hartford paid Analysts a salary and misclassified salaried employees as non-exempt and did not pay overtime to these individuals. In the Monserrate case, the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida granted conditional certification of the collective members and required that notice to other potential class members be sent so that they were aware of their option to join the suit.
Hartford employees with the job title “Analyst” who are salaried and classified as exempt may be eligible to join the two new suits that Lytle & Barszcz has filed against the Hartford Fire Insurance Company.
These cases reinforce the original purposes of the FLSA as enunciated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1944, which stated that the “FLSA’s remedial and humanitarian purposes” support “the rights of those who toil, of those who sacrifice a full measure of their freedom and talents to the use and profit of others. [1]”
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is the federal law that specifically establishes the workweek, minimum wage and youth employment standards. It is administered by the United States Department of Labor.
[1] Tennessee Coal Co. v. Muscoda (1944)