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 →8 NOV
The Wine Group, one of the world’s largest winemakers producing about 53 million cases of wine annually, recently settled a wage and hour case for $6.8 million. A former employee, Eliazar Gonzalez, sued the wine company for unpaid wages and this past week a California Judge approved the settlement. The Wine Group currently has almost 1,000 employees, however the employees eligible for this class-action settlement include current and former hourly, non-exempt employees that worked with Wine Group ...
Continue Reading →7 NOV
Berry Bros General Contractors, one of the largest construction service providers in the United States, has just been sued over failing to pay its employees the proper wages. There are a significant number of potentially affected employees throughout the nation working on projects for Berry Bros in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota. Affected job titles include mechanics, electricians, welders and other laborers with similar ...
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 →2 OCT
In this past year alone after hurricane Irma and Maria wreaked havoc in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. To date $14,337,657 has been recovered in unpaid wages for recovery workers by the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) of the Department of Labor (DOL). Almost 8,000 recovery workers have benefitted from this recovery process. Nevertheless, many thousands more may still be owed significant overtime pay.
The WHD’s efforts focused on educating employers and employees about compliance with ...
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 ...
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