As of December 31, 2018, the hourly minimum wage for New Yorkers has increased yet again. New York City employers with 11 employees or more must pay their hourly workers $15.00 per hour and the appropriate overtime rate at time and a half when working over 40 hours per week. For hard working employees, the wage boost is much needed especially in a city where the cost of living is so high. Governor Andrew Cuomo proudly commented ...
Continue Reading →7 DEC
When signing an arbitration agreement with your employer, you are promising to pursue any legal claims against them such as wrongful termination, discrimination, and breach of contracts, through arbitration as opposed to a lawsuit. In an arbitration, your claims are presented to, and decided by an arbitrator as opposed to a jury. Forgoing a jury of your peers is often viewed as a disadvantage for the plaintiff since juries tend to be more sympathetic towards employees. Recently, the Appellate Court ...
Continue Reading →2 NOV
Delivery drivers for TFI International that were allegedly misclassified as independent contractors have arrived at a $4.75 million settlement to resolve claims of unpaid wages pending court approval. TFI, formerly known as Dynamex or Velocity Express, is a Canadian based transport and logistics company that services the United States, Mexico and Canada. Delivery Drivers for the company claimed in a lawsuit filed back in 2012 that they were improperly classified by TFI as independent contractors instead of ...
Continue Reading →15 OCT
Through their dedication and commitment to their hard-working clients, Fitapelli & Schaffer, LLP has helped recover over 100 million dollars and has once again been featured in Super Lawyers. The firm specializes exclusively on employee rights and has consistently achieved significant results when dealing with unpaid wages, overtime, commissions and tips, as well as wrongful termination due to discrimination and whistleblower claims. Learn more about the firm’s success by clicking below.
Continue Reading →26 SEP
Now that Hurricane Florence is over, many companies are hiring disaster relief workers and emergency service workers to help with the clean up and recovery process after the devastation. As is common with most hurricanes, a couple of weeks after they are over, the hard work begins. Billions of dollars’ worth of remediation and restoration take place and these hired relief workers have a wide array of job duties that range from filing and processing insurance claims to digging ditches ...
Continue Reading →25 SEP
There has been an important development for tipped workers at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Tipped workers are currently allowed to be paid the reduced minimum wage rate under the tip-credit provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The tip-credit provisions of the FLSA permit an employer, under certain circumstances, to pay tipped employees less than the full minimum hourly wage and take a “tip credit” against its minimum wage obligations. However, an employer is not permitted to ...
Continue Reading →13 SEP
Trunk Club, a Nordstrom subsidiary, which offers clients personal styling with mid to high end clothing brands recently agreed to pay its employees $1.75 million in a wage lawsuit. The hourly non-exempt workers alleged that they were required to perform work off-the-clock that went unpaid. Nordstrom’s Trunk Club offered their services nationwide with affected employees working in several states including California, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Illinois, Texas, Washington, D.C., and New York.
Under federal and state laws, including the ...
Continue Reading →12 SEP
In the last couple of years, numerous oilfield overtime lawsuits exposed companies in the oil and gas industry for misclassifying workers as independent contractors. These energy companies have recently turned to using this misclassification tactic as a means to reduce payroll costs at the employees’ expense. The misclassified employees often work well over 40 hours per week and receive no overtime pay. This is especially true when employees work for several weeks straight and anywhere from 10 ...
Continue Reading →28 AUG
Unfortunately, there are many job industries that frequently pay their workers a day rate or weekly salary without any regard to all the hours actually worked. This often denies a worker from being compensated correctly. They are left earning less than the hourly minimum wage and/or kept from receiving overtime pay at time and a half of what their regular hourly rates should be when working over 40 hours in a work week. The oil and gas industry, for example, ...
Continue Reading →20 AUG
An autobody shop in Smithtown, Long Island was sued last summer by the United States Department of Labor (USDOL) and has recently agreed to pay affected employees $400,000 in owed wages and damages. Almost 50 current and former employees were denied the proper overtime wages and experienced several labor violations. The autobody , Bi-County, is one of several Central Islip auto repair shops that have settled federal wage violations charged just this year alone.
The employees at this autobody that worked ...
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