Can an employer that knows or has reason to know an employee has worked overtime get out of paying overtime if the employee does not complain immediately about not being paid the overtime? "No" answered the Eleventh Circuit recently in Bailey v. Titlemax of Georgia in reversing a summary judgment granted by U.S. District Judge Marvin H. Shoob of the Northern District of Georgia.
Santonias Bailey was a victim of wage theft while working for Titlemax of Georgia. His supervisor told him that Titlemax did not pay overtime and made him work off the clock. His supervisor also altered his time cards to reduce the amount of time they reported Bailey had worked. Bailey sued for his overtime pay after leaving Titlemax's employment.
Titlemax's answer was, basically, so what? It blamed Bailey and pointed out that he had not followed its policies of reporting his supervisor's misconduct and accurately reporting his time worked on his time cards. According to Titlemax, Bailey was to blame for having his wages stolen and was entitled to nothing. This succeeded in the district court, which granted Titlemax summary judgment and dismissed Bailey's overtime claim.
The Eleventh Circuit reversed. It framed the question as follows:
if an employer knew its employee underreported his hours, can it still assert equitable defenses based on the employee's conduct in underreporting as a total bar to the employee's FLSA claim?
Put another way, the question is whether an employer can get away with intimidating an employee into letting wage theft slide? The FLSA was intended to police and prevent just that sort of abuse the Eleventh Circuit observed: "the goal of the FLSA is to counteract the inequality of bargaining power between employees and employer." This principle guided the court's holding:
If an employer knew or had reason to know that its employee underreported his hours, it cannot escape FLSA liability by asserting equitable defenses based on that underreporting. To hold otherwise would allow an employer to wield its superior bargaining power to pressure or even compel its employees to underreport their work hours, thus neutering the FLSA's purposeful reallocation of that power.
The court also noted that it could find no case where an employer's wage theft had been excused where the employer knew the employee's work hours were underreported and still it got away with wage theft because the employee did not immediately demand full compensation.
The Eleventh Circuit's unanimous opinion was authored by Circuit Judge Beverly Martin joined by Circuit Judge Lanier Anderson and visiting District Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York.
Robert L. Abell
www.RobertAbellLaw.com
