What’s the trendiest flavor of employee lawsuits these days? Retaliation for wage-and-hour complaints. Here’s a case that illustrates the growing danger to employers.

Kathy Minor was a medical technologist for Bostwick Laboratories in Virginia. She and several other members of her department met with Bostwick’s COO to complain that their supervisor routinely altered employees’ time sheets to avoid showing the overtime hours they’d worked — a direct violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Six days later, Bostwick fired Minor, saying there was “too much conflict with (her) supervisors and the relationship just (wasn’t) working.”

Bostwick sued, saying she’d been terminated in retaliation for making her FLSA complaint.

In court, the company countered that it couldn’t be liable for retaliation, since an internal, informal complaint concerning an FLSA issue wasn’t protected  — a formal, official claim was the only activity covered under the statute.

A lower court agreed with the company and dismissed the case. An appeals court reversed.

The appeals court cited a recent Supreme Court decision in which it ruled that an oral complaint could be protected under the FLSA if it’s “sufficiently clear … for a reasonable employer to understand it … as an assertion of rights under the statute.”

The appeals court sent the case back to the lower court. And we know what that means: an expensive, drawn-out trial or an equally expensive settlement.

The take-away for employers: Even the most casual mentions of potential wage-and-hour disputes may qualify as “claims” — and any action taken to discipline the workers involved might well be regarded as retaliation by a judge.

Retaliation: Managing Employers’ #1 Risk (and Jurors’ Favorite Claim) will be among more than 30 sessions at LEAP 2012 – the Labor and Employment Law Advanced Practices Symposium March 21-23 at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. To find out more about the conference, go here.

Cite: Minor v. Bostwick Laboratories. To read the full decision, go here.

Tags: Minor v. Bostwick Laboratories, retaliation, wage and hour