Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime

Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (Full Version)

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pahunkboy -> Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/6/2010 9:18:55 PM)
Workers for Bank of America Corp, one of the nation's largest employers, have sued the company for allegedly failing to pay overtime and other wages. The lawsuit filed on Friday in federal court in Kansas City, Kansas, consolidates 12 lawsuits filed on behalf of employees in California, Florida, Kansas, Texas and Washington. It seeks nationwide class-action status on behalf of employees at Bank of America retail branches and call centers over the past three years./snip http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100605/us_nm/us_bankofamerica_overtime_lawsuit

tazzygirl -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/6/2010 9:22:03 PM)
Whoa. 180,000 people. BoA might as well open their wallet. I dont see this ending well for the company at all.

LadyEllen -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/7/2010 4:38:16 AM)
Fire the lot of them and then call in any outstanding credit they have. That should sort it out. Cant fund a lawsuit when you live in a cardboard box under a bridge. E (author of Arbeit Und Brot - HR Management For The 21st Century)

rulemylife -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/7/2010 5:13:51 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: tazzygirl Whoa. 180,000 people. BoA might as well open their wallet. I dont see this ending well for the company at all. Not to worry. Bank of America will just apply for another bailout.

eyesopened -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/7/2010 5:30:01 AM)
I have no love for BAC and would not give my money to them if they were the last bank on earth. That being said, we really only have one side of the story. What I read between the lines is that some enterprising attorney has found a great villian as his firm's potential rainmaker. The employees, if they were cheated out of pay, would be way better off to file a complaint with their own state's labor board. That way they would recieve all of the pay due to them. With a class-action, the lawyer promises more than actual damages but will settle out of court, take 40% and divide the rest by 180,000 each of which will probably get a whopping $10 apiece or something like that. In most states if an employee is salaried, they are considered "expempt" from receiving overtime pay but can demand pay for actual hours if they are not offered compsensatory time off. Meaning if the employer requires more than 40 hours but then refuses to let you take that extra time off as "comp" time, then they have to pony up the cash. In the article is said BofA did offer comp time. I see this ending badly for the employees.

tazzygirl -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/7/2010 5:36:48 AM)
quote: The lawsuit alleges that BOA failed to pay bank tellers and personal bankers for overtime worked. In particular, these employees consistently work more than forty hours in a work week, but instead of paying overtime, BOA: (i) gives them "comp time," (ii) tells them not to record the hours worked over forty, and/or (iii) lowers or "modifies" the tellers' recorded hours by eliminating any overtime hours. Also, the lawsuit alleges that BOA automatically deducts time for meal breaks; however, employees were routinely required to perform work during unpaid meal breaks (or were not able to take such breaks). http://www.stuevesiegel.com/CM/CurrentCases/boalitigation.asp Bank tellers are salaried?

eyesopened -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/7/2010 5:47:37 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: tazzygirl Bank tellers are salaried? I don't know. I'm just saying that if they are, then they would be expempt and would normally be offered comp time. That the article said they were offered compt time made me wonder if they were salaried. A lot of companies offer salary to even "lowly" positions because comp time is often cheaper for the company than overtime pay. The article doesn't specify whether the employees were all hourly wage earners or if they were salaried. I still believe the employees would do better to go through their labor boards than to trust a class-action suit to be their best option. Just my opinion.

tazzygirl -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/7/2010 6:05:47 AM)
Im actually surprised that BoA doesnt have the same employment clause as Citibank where arbitration is the rule. ETA I just stumbled across this, eyes. It definitely sheds an interesting light on what is happening and the possible outcome. The Myth of the Salaried Bank Employee: Fiction and Fact A common trade practice has arisen in many banking and financial institutions of assuring certain employees (low-level loan officers, personal bankers, tellers and account managers) that they will be paid a set "salary," commensurate with a 40-hour work-week, despite the fact that these employees work only 35 to 38 hours in any week. Because the employees are then deemed to be "salaried" and because there is a "cushion" of 2 to 3 hours every week in this "salaried" arrangement, the institutions often "forget" to have the employees maintain daily records of the time they actually spend working. The institutions also "forget" to pay these employees overtime for time worked in excess of 40 hours per week. Interestingly, many institutions "dock" these employees' wages when they find they do not meet the 35 to 38 hour per week minimum attendance requirement in a week-essentially mixing some of the elements of "exempt" treatment with the elements of "non-exempt" treatment of employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The Department of Labor recently settled a case with one banking institution that adhered to a trade practice like the one described. The settlement required the bank to pay $3.8 million dollars to all the individuals in the bank's employ which the bank had designated "personal bankers." The bank was also required to re-classify these "personal bankers" from salaried to hourly, or from "exempt" to "non-exempt" status.

cadenas -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/7/2010 6:24:57 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: eyesopened quote: ORIGINAL: tazzygirl Bank tellers are salaried? I don't know. I'm just saying that if they are, then they would be expempt and would normally be offered comp time. That the article said they were offered compt time made me wonder if they were salaried. A lot of companies offer salary to even "lowly" positions because comp time is often cheaper for the company than overtime pay. The article doesn't specify whether the employees were all hourly wage earners or if they were salaried. I still believe the employees would do better to go through their labor boards than to trust a class-action suit to be their best option. Just my opinion. The tellers and personal bankers were hourly employees, according to the actual complaint. http://www.donelonpc.com/pdfs/bofa/Complaint.pdf If they can prove it, I think there's pretty good chance of success for the employees. These practices seem to be rampant employers, and courts have started to crack down on it; there were a number of similar cases recently. Wal-Mart has lost not just one but several such lawsuits in the last few years; the largest of them cost them well over half a billion dollars. What is probably most damaging to Bank of America (as well as the Wal-Mart case) is that apparently, they forced employees to falsify their hourly work records.

eyesopened -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/7/2010 6:29:13 AM)
Thanks Tazzy and Cadenas for the info! Very informative! I'll be interested to see how this turns out. As much as I detest BofA (my own experience with them) I distrust class-action tort attorneys even more. I hope the employees get their pay. I hope the attornies don't end up being the only ones to actually win.

pahunkboy -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/7/2010 6:54:02 AM)
class action suits are usually good for attorneys. - not much good for the litigants.

thornhappy -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/7/2010 7:33:09 PM)
Yeah, I flip the bird to the guys running class-action ads on TV.

willbeurdaddy -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/8/2010 12:18:35 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: eyesopened quote: ORIGINAL: tazzygirl Bank tellers are salaried? I don't know. I'm just saying that if they are, then they would be expempt and would normally be offered comp time. That the article said they were offered compt time made me wonder if they were salaried. A lot of companies offer salary to even "lowly" positions because comp time is often cheaper for the company than overtime pay. The article doesn't specify whether the employees were all hourly wage earners or if they were salaried. I still believe the employees would do better to go through their labor boards than to trust a class-action suit to be their best option. Just my opinion. This and your prior post are misleading. WRT to compensatory time for exempt ("salaried") employees , it is additional compensation paid voluntarily by a company to its exempt employees. It is not required to be paid by law even if an exempt employee works 100 hours in a week. Comp time for exempt employees is fairly unusual, and in fact, is sometimes only offered as a prophylactic against losing a claim that an exempt employee is actually non-exempt. Further, it is generally not offered to bonus eligible employees, regardless of whether or not the bonus is equivalent to what overtime would have been had the employee been non-exempt. Comp time is a legally acceptable alternative to cash for non-exempt (generally public) employees that work overtime, within certain constraints.

Fellow -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/8/2010 3:43:01 PM)
May 2, 2003--SEATTLE--Bank of America Corp. reached a $4.1 million settlement Thursday with Washington state bank employees seeking overtime pay in the client services area. ........................................... It seems mega-corporations have reptile brains (Dinosaurs), they learn nothing. Goldmine for class-action lawyers.

TreasureKY -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/8/2010 5:00:15 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: eyesopened quote: ORIGINAL: tazzygirl Bank tellers are salaried? I don't know. I'm just saying that if they are, then they would be expempt and would normally be offered comp time. That the article said they were offered compt time made me wonder if they were salaried. A lot of companies offer salary to even "lowly" positions because comp time is often cheaper for the company than overtime pay. The article doesn't specify whether the employees were all hourly wage earners or if they were salaried. I still believe the employees would do better to go through their labor boards than to trust a class-action suit to be their best option. Just my opinion. Eyes, I'm not sure they'd be better off going through the Department of Labor. The DoL would require that BoA compensate any employees with recorded overtime for the past three years... unfortunately, it sounds like BoA altered all the records to show no overtime. As for the exempt vs. non-exempt issue... there are very strict Federal guidelines about who can be made exempt and who cannot. It isn't up to the State, company, or employee. The practice of offering comp time to a salaried/exempt employee is a dangerous one. It lends credence to any claim that the employee is actually hourly as exempt employees are to be hired for a set amount of pay per week for their work... not how many hours they work. In the same respect, a company generally cannot dock a salaried employee for not working 40 hours in any given week... except for a few, very specific guidelines that allow it.

thompsonx -> RE: Bank of America workers across U.S. sue for overtime (6/8/2010 5:10:11 PM)
Tazzygirl: The Myth of the Salaried Bank Employee: Fiction and Fact A common trade practice has arisen in many banking and financial institutions of assuring certain employees (low-level loan officers, personal bankers, tellers and account managers) that they will be paid a set "salary," commensurate with a 40-hour work-week, despite the fact that these employees work only 35 to 38 hours in any week. Because the employees are then deemed to be "salaried" and because there is a "cushion" of 2 to 3 hours every week in this "salaried" arrangement, the institutions often "forget" to have the employees maintain daily records of the time they actually spend working. The institutions also "forget" to pay these employees overtime for time worked in excess of 40 hours per week. Interestingly, many institutions "dock" these employees' wages when they find they do not meet the 35 to 38 hour per week minimum attendance requirement in a week-essentially mixing some of the elements of "exempt" treatment with the elements of "non-exempt" treatment of employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The Department of Labor recently settled a case with one banking institution that adhered to a trade practice like the one described. The settlement required the bank to pay $3.8 million dollars to all the individuals in the bank's employ which the bank had designated "personal bankers." The bank was also required to re-classify these "personal bankers" from salaried to hourly, or from "exempt" to "non-exempt" status. You have hit that nail square and driven it straight. Good shot.

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