Prison guards in Missouri will be able to recover significant amount of owed wages, after a decade long lawsuit. Approximately 13,000 current and former prison guards from over 20 state prisons across the Missouri stand to benefit from the $128 million settlement. The preliminarily approvedsettlement will be paid out in installments. First, $33 million of the total will go to affected employees that will each get a prorated amount based on how long they worked for the agency.Then, over the course of the next 8 years, $65 million will be paid out to prison guards via an extra 15 minutes of overtime for every shift they work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The original lawsuit, which was filed back in 2012, alleged guards did not get paid for all of their hours worked. Specifically, prison guards had to pass through significant levels of security checks in close proximity to prisoners, all the while in uniform, and expected to be \u201con duty and expected to respond\u201d. Additionally, guards had to spend significant amount of time after each shift on exit procedures, such as communicating relevant information to the incoming workersand take inventory of all weapons and ammunition. However,none of this time was taken into account when calculating their regular rate of pay or overtime rates when working over forty hours per week. Federal and state laws, such as the Fair Labor Standard\u2019s Act (\u201cFLSA\u201d) protect workers to ensure they are paid for all compensable time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n