The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires that employees who work outside of regular hours be awarded a premium pay for overtime work. More specifically, companies are mandated to pay for hours worked in excess of a regular 40-hours workweek at a rate of at least time and one-half the regular rate.
Under the FLSA, employees are not allowed to offer a fixed salary for a workweek longer than 40 hours. T-Mobile appears to be skirting this rule.
Per Gomez, who has been with T-Mobile for nearly 11 years, the telecom titan pays overtime employees around $30 for each extra shift on average. This bonus doesn’t take into account the time and one-half overtime rule.
Gomez is paid $41 an hour and he believes that T-Mobile is not compensating him properly for overtime work. This is suspected to be the case for thousands of employees across the US and Gomez intends to represent all of them, including former employees who were paid a flat rate for at least one additional shift in the past three years.
The lawsuit seeks to collect withheld wages, damages, and attorneys’ fees. It also wants a ruling that T-Mobile‘s actions were willful.
The defendant’s conduct is willful, carried out in bad faith, and has caused significant financial harm to employees.
Olvin Gomez v. T-Mobile USA Inc, September 2024
Huge corporations like T-Mobile often choose to settle cases like these to avoid time-consuming court battles and we might see that in this instance too, though that’s just a speculation.
It will be interesting to see if employees are adequately compensated for the unpaid hours and the costs to them and how much of the settlement fund is allocated to attorney fees, given lawyers are sometimes viewed as the biggest beneficiaries in lawsuits.
