Berry Bros General Contractors, one of the largest construction service providers in the United States, has just been sued over failing to pay its employees the proper wages. There are a significant number of potentially affected employees throughout the nation working on projects for Berry Bros in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota. Affected job titles include mechanics, electricians, welders and other laborers with similar ...
Continue Reading →26 SEP
Now that Hurricane Florence is over, many companies are hiring disaster relief workers and emergency service workers to help with the clean up and recovery process after the devastation. As is common with most hurricanes, a couple of weeks after they are over, the hard work begins. Billions of dollars’ worth of remediation and restoration take place and these hired relief workers have a wide array of job duties that range from filing and processing insurance claims to digging ditches ...
Continue Reading →25 SEP
There has been an important development for tipped workers at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Tipped workers are currently allowed to be paid the reduced minimum wage rate under the tip-credit provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The tip-credit provisions of the FLSA permit an employer, under certain circumstances, to pay tipped employees less than the full minimum hourly wage and take a “tip credit” against its minimum wage obligations. However, an employer is not permitted to ...
Continue Reading →20 AUG
An autobody shop in Smithtown, Long Island was sued last summer by the United States Department of Labor (USDOL) and has recently agreed to pay affected employees $400,000 in owed wages and damages. Almost 50 current and former employees were denied the proper overtime wages and experienced several labor violations. The autobody , Bi-County, is one of several Central Islip auto repair shops that have settled federal wage violations charged just this year alone.
The employees at this autobody that worked ...
Continue Reading →14 JUN
California’s Department of Industrial Relations has just dropped the hammer on Cheesecake Factory. The state agency is enforcing a recent law that holds businesses jointly liable for workplace violations experienced by contracted and subcontracted workers such as unpaid wages. The famed chain restaurant had used a cleaning services contractor that subcontracted out the work for overnight janitorial staff but an investigation launched by the state agency found that those workers were not paid properly as well as ...
Continue Reading →10 JAN
The Beatrice Inn , a critically acclaimed high end “chop house” restaurant located in New York City, has just been hit with a class action lawsuit in order to help recover owed wages. The lawsuit alleges that the Beatrice Inn owes its employees minimum wages, overtime compensation, misappropriated tips, and other damages. Affected workers include captains, bartenders, barbacks, and other similarly situated non-managerial employees, commonly referred to as “tipped workers”. Fitapelli & Schaffer, LLP, the employment law firm handling the ...
Continue Reading →7 DEC
The acclaimed chain Haru restaurants of New York have landed themselves in a bit of hot water after a recent wage lawsuit claims they have been paying tipped workers less than the full minimum wage in conjunction with other pay issues. These wage claims violate the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) and the New York Labor Law (“NYLL”), federal and state laws, designed to protect worker rights. Fitapelli & Schaffer, LLP filed this class action lawsuit yesterday which intends ...
Continue Reading →20 SEP
The Appellate Division, First Department recently ruled that “live-in” nurses working 24-hour shifts should be paid for all 24 hours regardless of their allotted sleep and meal breaks. This ruling came in stark contrast to what had been the New York State Department of Labor’s (DOL) longstanding view that “live-in” nurses’ payment should follow the 13-Hour Rule. It required that they only be paid for 13 hours of their shift if they were allotted at least 8 hours of sleep ...
Continue Reading →31 JUL
On Friday, July 28, 2017 Fitapelli & Schaffer, LLP along with Pechman Law Group PLLC filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of two asbestos handlers and their similarly situated co-workers who worked at Incinia Contracting. This full service environmental company with over a decade of servicing the public and private sectors has allegedly failed to pay its hourly employees overtime at time and a half their regular hourly rate for hours worked over 40 in a work week.
This lawsuit ...
Continue Reading →5 APR
There has been an important development for tipped workers in the state of Connecticut. The Connecticut Supreme court has decided that delivery workers cannot be paid a tip credit instead of the full minimum wage rate. The norm had been that businesses like hotels and restaurants would pay its delivery workers the reduced minimum wage because they were earning tips, however, this recent decision points out that the law may have been misinterpreted all along. Delivery workers may have always ...
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