Wage and Hour Defense Blog

On August 16, 2023, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Third Circuit vacated and remanded a decision from the Middle District of Pennsylvania ruling that the time spent by oil-rig workers changing in and out of their protective gear was not compensable.

Plaintiffs Rodney Tyger, Shawn Wadsworth brought a Fair Labor Standards Act collective action against Defendants Precision Drilling Corp., Precision Drilling Oilfield Services, Inc., and Precision Drilling Company, LP (“Precision”), an oil rig, for failing to pay them for pre-shift donning and post-shift doffing of ...

Litigators who defend cases brought under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”), particularly ‘collective actions” alleging wage-and-hour violations, often have been able to counter, or even sometimes support, allegations that arbitration agreements have been waived where the conduct of a party has caused prejudice to the other side. In the case of Morgan v. Sundance, Inc., a unanimous Supreme Court has now held that the determinant of waiver is solely dependent upon the nature and magnitude of the actions of the party that might be inconsistent with arbitration, without respect to alleged prejudice.

In a provocative  decision in the case known as  Swales v. KLLM Transport Servs., L.L.C., No. 19-60847 (5^th Cir. 2021), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit broke from the pack by upending the standard two-step process for Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA” or the “Act”) collective certification. The Court opined that the two-step process followed by many, if not most, district courts throughout the country wrongly permitted conditional certification of collective actions without the appropriate evidentiary support to properly determine whether members of the ...