
According to court documents, Lowe’s violated the California labor code by failing to:
- Provide rest and meal breaks
- Pay overtime wages
- Maintain accurate records for hours worked
- Pay wages when due
- Provide accurate wage statements
- Reimburse work-related expenses
- Pay all wages due upon an employee’s termination.
Avoiding Overtime
A recent paper (January 2023) published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found “widespread evidence of firms appearing to avoid paying overtime wages by exploiting a federal law that allows them to do so for employees termed as “managers” and paid a salary above a pre-defined dollar threshold.” Translated by the NYT: Many companies provide salaries just above the federal cutoff to frontline workers and mislabel them as managers to deny them overtime.
The researchers found:
- More overtime unpaid when firms have stronger bargaining power and employees have weaker rights.
- Overtime more comonon for firms with financial constraints and when there are weaker labor outside options in the region. Occupations in low-wage industries penalized more often for overtime violations. Our results suggest broad usage of Overtime avoidance using job titles across locations and over time.
- Wages avoided are substantial - firms avoid roughly 13.5% in overtime expenses for each strategic “manager” hired
Lowe’s Managers
Federal law requires employers to pay time-and-a-half overtime to hourly workers after 40 hours, and to most salaried workers whose salary is below about $35,500 a year. Companies need not pay overtime to salaried employees who make above that amount if they really are managers. A recent New York Times article reveals that many employers—and many of them retailers-- are mislabeling rank-and-file workers as managers to avoid paying them overtime.
READ MORE CALIFORNIA LABOR LAW LEGAL NEWS
According to the complaint, Lowe’s required some managers to do the following, without compensation:
- read and respond to their work email from their smart phones during non-work hours
- come to work early to perform a “sweep” of the store property in their car
- arm and disarm the alarm system
In May 2022 Lowe’s settled its managers’ unpaid wages lawsuit for $7.45 million. Nearly 2,400 hourly managers claimed they were denied pay for certain off-the-clock work. The settlement resolved a multi-district litigation that included one federal case filed under the Fair Labor Standards Act and 18 state law wage and hour actions.
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Jenny Bidinger
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