Posted on: Sunday, August 4, 2002
More employees collecting overtime pay by filing lawsuits
By Adam Geller
Associated Press
NEW YORK — There were years, Omar Belazi says, when he willingly logged 65-hour weeks, stayed late to vacuum the store's floor and clean the bathroom, or surrendered his Sundays to hit sales targets.
Associated Press But a decade later — after Belazi began asking his wife and father-in-law to clean his RadioShack store without pay to help him keep up — he grew tired of waiting for the payback.
"It gets to be very stressful, very tiring. ... You just get up and go to RadioShack and go home and go to sleep," said Belazi, a former store manager for the electronics chain in Santa Barbara, Calif. "They gave me all these awards (for sales achievement), but it didn't do me any good. They didn't pay me."
A growing number of workers like Belazi are demanding more from their employers. The result is a flood of lawsuits by employees, many in arguably "professional" jobs, who accuse their companies of cheating them out of overtime pay.
The surge in claims — some resulting in multimillion-dollar settlements — reflects an uptick in a long-simmering debate over overtime pay and who is entitled to it.
In part, that debate reflects the fact that Americans are working more hours — longer than their counterparts in every other industrialized country — and that employers are trying to stretch productivity. But it also hinges on changes in the jobs people do and what they're called.
With manufacturing jobs dwindling, more workers now toil for employers who pay salaries and bestow people with hard-to-define titles like "analyst," "manager" and "administrator."
Federal law says employers don't have to pay overtime to salaried workers in executive, administrative or professional jobs. But the law, the Fair Labor Standards Act, which has undergone only limited revision since the 1970s, relies on some outdated salary figures and terminology that leaves room for broad interpretation. California, which has become a hotbed of overtime battles, has a law that grants overtime pay to a broader group of workers.
That has helped stir clashes between employers and employees with differing ideas about the definition and responsibilities of a professional and what is fair pay.
RadioShack agreed in July to pay $29.9 million to settle a lawsuit led by Belazi on behalf of 1,300 current and former California store managers. The workers contended they were owed overtime because the company made virtually all managerial decisions at higher levels, and required that they spend most of their hours as salesmen.
The payment by RadioShack is the most recent in a series of very large settlements in California.
Mark Hill is senior vice president and general counsel for RadioShack, which has denied fault. He says store managers' average pay is $60,000 a year. "These are not underpaid hourly workers who are being mischaracterized as salaried workers simply so an employer would not have to pay for long hours worked," Hill said.
Omar Belazi led a lawsuit against RadioShack Corp., alleging that the company failed to pay managers overtime. RadioShack has agreed to a $29.9 million settlement for 1,300 managers.
