Personal Injury Law

Tennessee wage and hour cases on the rise

Over the past few months our office has had an large increase in wage and hour cases throughout Tennessee. I do not know if it is a product of the current economy or people are just tired of being mistreated. Regardless, it is unfortunate but it is often the case the employers try to increase their profit by cheating the people out of their wages.

One common scheme we are seeing recently are having people clock out of work while they are still required to be on the premises. Often the company will have the worker clock out and come to a mandatory office meeting. Although this may only be a few dollars for the individual employee it adds up to a significant amount of money that the employer is taking from their workers.

We are also seeing significant number of misclassification cases. Put simply, the employer gives a regular employee a supervisor or manager title so they do not have to pay overtime. The problem arises when the employee has no manager duties. For instance in one recent case our office pursued almost every employee at a fast food restaurant was called an assitant manager and paid a salary. The employees worked in excess of 40 hours a week but received no overtime because of these bogus titles. Fortuantly, we were able to recover a significant amount of lost wages for these workers. Some of the workers had lost their overtime for several years so the lost pay was significant.

If you have a an overtime pay or other employment law question, please feel free to contact our Tennessee Law office.

Full post as published by Tennessee Law Blog on May 31, 2009 (boomark / email).