Tennessee Wage and Hour Cases on the Rise

Over the past few months, our Nashville law office has had an large increase in wage and hour cases throughout Tennessee. I do not know if it is a product of the current economy or people are just tired of being mistreated. Regardless, it is unfortunate but it is often the case the Tennessee employers try to increase their profit by cheating Tennesseans out of their wages.

One common scheme we are seeing recently are having people clock out of work while they are still required to be on the premises. Often the company will have the worker clock out and come to a mandatory office meeting. Although this may only be a few dollars for the individual employee it adds up to a significant amount of money that the employer is taking from their workers.

We are also seeing significant number of misclassification cases. Put simply, the TN employer gives a regular employee a supervisor or manager title so they do not have to pay overtime. The problem arises when the employee has no manager duties.

For instance, in one recent case our Nashville law office pursued almost every employee at a fast food restaurant was called an “assistant manager” and paid a salary. The employees worked in excess of 40 hours a week but received no overtime because of these bogus titles. Fortunately, our employment lawyers were able to recover a significant amount of lost wages for these workers. Some of the workers had been losing their overtime for several years of unpaid overtime, so the lost pay they recovered was significant.

If you have an overtime pay or other employment law question, please feel free to contact our Tennessee workplace law office.