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USA Today/ ­- News, Seg, 16 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Supreme Court)
More U.S. workers sue employers for
overtime
Americans were pushed to their limit in the recession
and its aftermath as they worked longer hours, often
for the same or less pay, after businesses laid off
almost 9 million employees. Now, many are striking
back in court. Since the height of the recession in
2008, more workers across the nation have been suing
employers under federal and state wage­-and­-hour
laws. The number of lawsuits filed last year was up
32% vs.
2008, an increase that some experts partly attribute to
a post­-downturn austerity that pervaded the American
workplace and artificially inflated productivity. Workers'
main grievance is that they had to put in more than 40
hours a week without overtime pay through various
practices: â¢They were forced to work off the clock.
â¢Their jobs were misclassified as exempt from
overtime requirements. â¢Because of smartphones
and other technology, work bled into their personal
time.
"The recession (put) more pressure on businesses to
squeeze workers and cut costs," says Catherine
Ruckelshaus, legal co­-director of the National
Employment Law Project. If employers had to bear the
actual expense of overtime, she says, they likely would
have hired more workers in the economic recovery. In
response, employers are playing defense. They're
drawing clearer lines between workers and managers,
and in many cases, reining in modern office privileges,
such as company­-issued smartphones and
telecommuting. The upshot, in many instances, could
be a very different American workplace. Courts,
meanwhile, must reconcile decades­-old labor laws with
ever­-evolving technology.
The spread of BlackBerrys and iPhones has many
workers tethered to employers, for better or worse,
even during off hours and vacations. The controversy
has reached the Supreme Court, but in a case
involving an age­-old profession: sales. Monday, the
justices will hear oral arguments in a class­-action
lawsuit against drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline.
Pharmaceutical sales representatives â traditionally
classified as exempt from overtime pay â say they've
been misclassified, a stance backed by the Labor
Department in another case. Glaxo says the sales
force clearly is exempt under current law.
Legacy of another time Employers say the explosion of
lawsuits shows how the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act
(FLSA) â at the center of the Glaxo case â has
become outmoded in an age when most employees
want the flexibility to work at home or answer office
e­-mail while running about on their free time.
"The law has not kept pace with the contemporary
workplace," says Randy MacDonald, IBM's head of
human resources. Many companies have reclassified
salaried executives as hourly employees â often to the
consternation of the workers themselves, says Dan
Yager, general counsel of the HR Policy Association,
which represents human resource professionals. Such
a strategy lets employers head off lawsuits by paying a
lower basic wage that accounts for expected overtime.
Under the FLSA, employees are entitled to overtime
unless they're executives who manage and hire and
fire employees; administrators who make key
decisions; or professionals â such as lawyers and
engineers â with advanced degrees, among other
criteria. Also exempt are certain information
technology workers and sales representatives whose
hours can't easily be tracked. Employees must earn at
least $455 a week to be exempt. While all hourly
employees are entitled to overtime, salaried workers
may also qualify if they don't fall under any of the
exemptions. Last year, 7,006 wage­-and­-hour suits,
many of them class actions, were filed in federal court,
nearly quadruple the 2000 total, according to defense
law firm Seyfarth Shaw.
Meanwhile, in fiscal 2011, the Labor Department
recovered $225 million in back wages for employees,
up 28% from fiscal 2010. Labor has added 300
wage­-and­-hour investigators the past two years,
increasing its staff by 40% to 1,050. The department
"has stepped up its efforts to protect workers,"
particularly "in high­-risk industries that employ
low­-wage and vulnerable workers," such as hotels and
restaurants, says Nancy Leppink, deputy administrator
of the wage­-and­-hour division. Several attorneys for
plaintiff workers say employers wrung more output
from fewer employees during recoveries following the
2001 and 2007­-09 recessions.
Both upturns initially yielded sluggish job growth. "A lot
of companies make a business decision to say, 'We
can cut corners on this, and we won't get sued,' " says
plaintiffs' attorney David Schlesinger of Nichols Kaster
in Minneapolis. productivity, or output per labor hour,
rose 2.3% in 2009 and 4% in 2010 â a period that
includes the recession's final months and its aftermath
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