A federal appeals court issued a major ruling yesterday on overtime pay for cable technicians. The employees were awarded $3.8 million.
Here is a quote from the decision (in red text):
FTS Technicians presented evidence that FTS implemented a company-wide time-shaving policy that required technicians to systematically underreport their overtime hours. Managers told or encouraged technicians to underreport time or even falsified timesheets themselves. To underreport overtime hours in compliance with FTS policy, technicians either began working before their recorded start times, recorded lunch breaks they did not take, or continued working after their recorded end time.
FTS Technicians also presented documentary evidence and testimony from technicians, managers, and an executive showing that FTS's time-shaving policy originated with FTS's corporate office.
There is more to this story. The employees won a verdict in 2012 directing FTS to pay for missed overtime. For the past five years, the matter has been in court because there aren’t precise records for the hundreds of members of the class. That’s because it’s the employer’s responsibility to keep time records accurately—and here, that didn’t happen.
The long-story short is that the appeals court said yesterday that a sample of reliable estimates from the larger class is sufficient to uphold the award of damages.
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