The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and Title VII protect employees nationwide in wage & hour matters, overtime, minimum wages, provisions for breaks, a maximum amount of hours an employee is supposed to work, and discrimination at the place of work.  If your employer has unjustly withheld your wages, failed to pay you properly, made illegal deductions from your wages, discriminated against you at work due to gender or race, they have violated Title VII or FALSA. This, in turn, means that they have violated your rights. If this is the case, you can defend your rights with help from an experienced employment lawyer. A lawyer may help you recover all the wages owed to you and other damages.

At Consumer Alert Now, we advocate for the upholding of employee and consumer rights countrywide. We are committed to informing you of your rights and help you seek the justice you deserve if those rights have been violated. If you have a FALSA or Title VII-related case, reach out to us as soon as possible. We will work to connect you with a competent attorney to discuss your case. A skilled lawyer who has your best interest at heart will increase your chances of winning so you can receive all your dues. Remember that your immigration status isn’t a concern in these cases. 

Overview of FLSA and Title VII

The FLSA was enacted by the United States Congress during the Great Depression to provide minimum standards of living necessary for employees’ efficiency, health, and general well-being and recommend minimum standards for working conditions. It achieves this through, among other ways, setting minimum overtime and wage payment requirements. Its objective is to ensure employees aren’t paid intolerably low wages.

Even though states may adopt independent, harsher, or more worker-favorable wage & hour statutes, some don’t have these kinds of laws. Therefore, the FLSA is the most effective regulation to protect employees’ wellbeing nationwide.

The FLSA protects all employees by dictating that they’re compensated at least a minimum wage, which as of 2019, it was at 7.25 dollars per hour. Any eligible employee under the law has a right to receive a payment of no less than 7.25 dollars per hour for the work they’ve done. It also protects given workers by dictating that they’re paid extra wages for the overtime they’ve worked. Under the FLSA, overtime means any hours above the forty hours you work in a workweek. It requires that if you are an eligible worker, you be paid 1½ times your standard pay rate for every overtime hour you work. For instance, if you’re being paid a minimum salary as FLSA dictates, you’re entitled to an hourly pay of 10.87 dollars for every overtime hour you work.

But not every worker has the right to receive a minimum wage, overtime, or entitled to other protections under the FLSA. If you are this kind of employee, you are considered an exempt worker. The FLSA considers you exempt if you work in a specific industry controlled by federal statute, for instance, trucking or railroad industries. You are also deemed exempt if you fall under any of these three classifications:

  • Executive employees— Executive employees include supervisory or managerial workers who oversee the other employees and make decisions concerning the company operations, like workflow, budgetary, and personnel decisions.
  • Professional employees— Professional employees include workers of given learned professions, like doctors, engineers, teachers, lawyers, or creative jobs such as musicians, writers, journalists, illustrators, or actors.
  • Administrative employees— Administrative employees are a class of workers who do non-manual office duties that support the employer’s business operations and require that they exercise discretion and judgment.

Other provisions under FLSA are:

  • A provision that forbids an employer from discriminating based on sex when compensating workers,
  • Child labor provisions that prohibit workers below 18 years from doing particular jobs, as well as limit the maximum number of hours they can work, and
  • The Portal to Portal Act of 1947.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Title VII is a federal law enforced by the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission). Under this law, an employer is prohibited from discriminating against potential employees based on specific characteristics such as sex, national origin, race, color, or religion. The law also provides that your employer shall not discriminate against you concerning any privilege, term, or condition of employment. Areas that can cause violations are recruiting, promoting, termination, hiring, disciplining, training, transferring, providing benefits, measuring performance, and assigning work.

This law applies to any employer in both the public and private sectors with fifteen or more workers. It also applies to the employment agencies, labor organizations, and federal government. If you work with an employer covered under Title VII or are applying to work for them, you can’t be treated differently or denied employment due to a workplace decision based on perceived religious, racial, sexual, or national characteristics. You can’t be treated differently based on your association with a person with any of these characteristics, either.

An employer may also not make employment decisions based on stereotypes or assumptions related to the characteristics mentioned above. For instance, it’s illegal for a supervisor to decline to promote an Indian to a management position because he/she believes that Asian people aren’t good leaders.

Common FLSA Violations

We have several ways by which your employer can be considered to have violated the FSLA. For instance, suppose the employer promised you certain paid vacation days, reimbursement of expenses, paid sick leaves, or any other wage supplement. If they then fail to uphold this agreement, you can take legal action against them. Any time your employer alters the rules, like changing policies concerning personal leaves of absence, sick leaves, working hours, or holidays, they have to follow a strict process for those changes to be lawful.

In certain instances, your employer may have committed a good faith mistake concerning the intricate laws. But in others, they might be intentionally and maliciously underpaying you. Examples of situations where your employer may be considered to have violated the FLSA are:

Failing to Pay You for the Overtime You Have Worked

In case your employer wants you to do your duties past the usual hours of work or on weekends, it can be challenging for you since you’ll have no or little time to take care of your family and personal needs. This will mostly affect you if you’re on salary instead of hourly pay.

The FLSA has overtime regulations, but it doesn’t impose restrictions on possible overtime. It only requires that if you’re paid per hour, then your employer must pay you 1½ times your wages for hours over forty in a workweek. Mandatory overtime may place extreme stress on employees, most of which have limited time to dedicate to family or any other activity. Some workers believe that the only means through which employers can determine their drive and commitment is expecting them to focus most of their attention and time on the firm and its success, hence why they do overtime.

In case you work beyond forty hours in a workweek and aren’t compensated for the overtime, you want to have a skilled labor and employment law attorney evaluate your case.

Improperly Classifying You as Exempt

You may be working in a position that your employer claims is exempt from overtime wages, as we have mentioned above. And, after a full assessment of your situation is done, it reveals that your career is non-exempt, and you’ve been lied out of receiving overtime wages you should’ve been paid. In other cases, your employer may assign you a title so they can categorize you as exempt when your duties don’t make you qualified to be one. If this is the case, you may be entitled to bring a claim seeking to recover all your back overtime earnings. You will need to reach out to a lawyer to assess the facts surrounding your case and advise whether you have a legal basis to bring a lawsuit to receive your overtime pay plus other damages.

Making Unwarranted Deductions From Your Paycheck

If you are a non-exempt employee, the law requires that your employer should not make any deductions from your paycheck if that deduction would lead to earning effectively less than the minimum salary for the pay period. And if you’re a salaried employee, your employer also has to pay you your full salary. He/she can deduct the pay only:

  • For your full-day absences that aren’t related to disability or illness
  • To offset salary for military service or jury duty.
  • For fines for the safety rules infractions you’ve committed
  • For unpaid disciplinary suspensions for workplace misconduct
  • For your last or first employment week, if you don’t work the full week.

Misclassification as an Independent Contractor When You’re an Employee

Your employer may identify you as an independent contractor when, indeed, under the federal statute, you’re not. If you’re economically dependent on your employer, regardless of your level of skills, then you’re an employee and not a contractor.

An independent contractor is a person in business for himself/herself. Most employees suffer hardships simply because they’re wrongly categorized as independent contractors instead of employees, leaving them with no access to benefits like overtime wages. The FLSA establishes whether you’re indeed a worker and not a contractor by assessing these facts:

  • The degree to which your duties are essential to the company— Here, it is considered whether your management skills impact loss or profit chances. If you exercise managerial skills, then you’re likely a worker and not an independent contractor.
  • Your initiative and skills— A contractor should have the capability of exercising their independent business judgments and operate as an independent business.
  • The investment both you and employer have made in equipment and facilities— For you to be legally classified as a contractor, you must have done a given degree of investment in your instruments of the business. In case all the investments in equipment and tools are from your employer, it suggests that you have to be appropriately classified as a worker.
  • The level of control your employer exercises— A contractor is that person who works free from his/her employer’s control or that of the employer’s clients. Merely working offsite isn’t enough to establish whether you’re an employee or contractor, especially when your employer exercises a substantial level of control over your working relationship with them.
  • Permanency of your position— A long-term relationship with your employer indicates that you are an employee and not an independent contractor. However, this fact needs full scrutiny of your situation as it pertains to the industry.

Failure to Maintain Records

FLSA requires that an employer keeps payroll records for at least three years. The records must comprise total hours worked every workday and workweek, deductions from salaries, workday and workweek earnings, overtime wages per workweek, and salary paid every pay period. The copies of work schedules and time cards should be kept for at least two years.

Other violations include:

  • Requiring or allowing ‘off duty’ work— Your employer may permit or require you to work when you are not supposed to be doing so. For example, he/she may need you to work during your unpaid break or mealtime or answer emails on weekends or at night.
  • If you are an hourly worker, not paying you for all the hours you have worked—Your employers’ payroll or time-clock systems might automatically clock you out when you’re still working.
  • Failure to calculate your regular pay rate for overtime purposes—Your employer might fail to consider all the aspects determining a standard pay rate, e.g., an hourly pay rate, salary, commission, tips, on-call pays, and non-discretionary bonuses.

FSLA & Title VII-Related Class Action Lawsuits

A class-action lawsuit is one of the intricate forms of litigation. An FSLA or Title VII class action involves several, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of complainants seeking an employer to pay them damages for violating their rights.

Most of the class action suits brought under FSLA have to do with wage & hour matters, for instance, claims for uncompensated overtime. Class actions under the FLSA are termed as ‘collective actions’, and have different rules & regulations from those under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. For instance, FLSA class action members affirmatively opt in instead of opting out.

Class-action lawsuits also arise under Title VII of the Civil Act of 1964, for example, job applicants claiming that an employer’s hiring practices have a contrasting effect on minorities.

The first line of defense for an employer facing a class-action lawsuit is challenging the class action certification. If the employer can persuade the judge that a class action shouldn’t be certified, the claim becomes a single plaintiff case. This means you’ll have to sue the employer independently. Single plaintiff cases have slim chances of success since you will be going against a well-established company with a swarm of skilled lawyers. One more thing is that single-plaintiff claims have limited damages, meaning that you may not obtain much compensation even if you succeed. Therefore, you need an attorney who is skillful in handling class certification matters and have won complainants’ class action certification motions with novel & creative strategies.

Employment Discrimination Class Action Lawsuit Against Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)

In 2018, CFPB and the then  Acting Director were subject to a class action that alleged discrimination against female and racial minority employees based on claims of fewer promotions and lesser pay compared to white male colleagues (Jones et al. v. Mulvaney).

The complaint, brought on 13th September 2018, alleged that the CFBP had violated Title VII, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Equal Pay Act of 1963. The suit sought punitive damages for lost benefits and payment for women and racial minorities who had worked with the CFPB as consumer response specialists.

The complainants claimed that whereas the function of the CFPB is to provide justice to the United States consumers, it, and the then Acting Director Mick Mulvaney, had failed in its duties to workers. The plaintiffs, Mr. Heynard Paz-Chow and Ms. Carzanna Jones, sought certification to be included in the class action of a group of female and racial minority employees, both present and past, working in the consumer response division. They alleged that they had faced similar retaliation and discrimination while working at the CFPB.

By then, Ms. Jones was a CFPB employee, and her claim covered the length of her career at the bureau, which dated back to 2012.  On the other hand, Mr. Paz-Chow was an ex-worker who had worked at the bureau from 2011 to 2014. He had filed his complaint under the management of ex CFPB Director Cordray.

The bureau’s consumer response division is in charge of investigating consumers’ complaints and establishing whether rules & regulations have been breached. The class action alleged that through the division’s practice and pattern of retaliation and discrimination, the CFPB had chosen to disparately impact female and racial minority workers regardless of these employees’ continued complaints. Specifically, the lawsuit claimed that the bureau had instituted discriminatory procedures and policies to evaluate, train, assign and compensate female and racial minority employees. It also detailed specific cases of retaliation and discrimination, which had supposedly been faced by specific complainants, including:

  • Pay disparities
  • Denial of promotions and training opportunities
  • Denial of requests to go on transfer
  • Failure to comply with the FMLA and ADA requirements
  • Retaliatory acts after workers complained about inequality.
  • Unequal assignment of investigations resulting in disproportionate closure of cases, which, in turn, affect employee evaluation

The lawsuit’s complaints dated as far back as 2011 and cited congressional reports and statistical studies highlighting equality concerns at the bureau under different directors. As per the suit, those reports and studies revealed deficiencies in both the promotion and pay of female workers and racial minorities, consistent with complainants’ allegations.

The suit cited a Congressional investigation conducted in 2014 by the United States House of Representatives and a 2015 report by the OIG (Office of Inspector General). These authorities had discovered substantial issues with extensive disparities negatively affecting female and racial minority workers regarding ratings, performance, promotion, etc. At one of the hearings of the House of Representative Financial Services Committee, testimony by the CFPB lawyer stated that white male employees in authoritative positions at the bureau awarded themselves excellent performance appraisals to receive bonuses and better raises.

Compensation in FLSA Suits

If an FSLA or Title VII class action suit is successful, you’ll generally be awarded the back pay you should’ve received as per the FLSA regulations. The judge may also grant you liquidated damages. These are a doubling of the unpaid back pay you receive, that’s awarded instead of interest or other expenses. In FLSA class actions, liquidated compensation is considered the rule and not the exception.

Your employer can evade liquidated damages only if they can prove that their failure to pay you the back pay you’ve been awarded was a good-faith mistake. Ignorance or passiveness of FLSA rules doesn’t satisfy the good faith requirement. Instead, the employer must prove any affirmative action like dependence on the legal counsel’s opinion.

Find a Labor and Employment Law Attorney Near Me

If you believe your employer owes you additional wages under FLSA rules, Consumer Alert Now can help you fight to receive the pay you’ve earned.  And, if you believe you have been discriminated against at your place of work, we can help you find justice. We will link you with an experienced labor & employment law lawyer who will review your case and establish the best course of action. For instance, if the employer owes you back pay, the lawyer can help you bring an administrative complaint and work with you in seeking the damages you deserve.

And if necessary, the attorney can file a claim in court, or better still, help you join a class action lawsuit to claim the wages you were denied or any damages you’re entitled to for being discriminated against. Don’t wait for more days to pass by before you start fighting for your rights. Call us today at 800-511-0747 to schedule a free consultation where you’ll learn much about your rights, the options you have, and how an attorney may help you pursue your claim successfully.