An employee marches into his supervisor’s office and says, “You’re cheating us out of our pay for putting on and taking off our safety gear.” Does that count as “filing” a complaint under the Fair Labor Standards Act? The Supreme Court is getting ready to tell us.
And if the High Court agrees with the findings of a federal appeals court, it could make it more difficult for employees to claim retaliation in employment law cases.
The court agreed to hear the case of Kevin Kasten, a worker in a Wisconsin plastics plant who was fired after he continually failed to use his electronic swipe card to record his hours on an automated timeclock.
Kasten said he’d made several oral complaints to both his supervisors and HR personnel — the location of the timeclocks prevented employees from being paid for the time they spent donning and doffing required protective gear, he claimed. Kasten, charging he was fired because of the complaints, sued for retaliation under the FLSA.
No paper trail
The employer, Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp., said he’d never filed a written complaint, so he couldn’t fall under the protection of the FLSA’s anti-retaliation provision. And the appeals court ruled that under the statute, the employee had to physically hand over a written document in order to fulfill FLSA requirements.
Now the question goes before the Supreme Court. What’s the likely outcome? The court has issued other employee-friendly rulings in FLSA cases, safeguarding workers’ rights to question wage-and-hour issues. But that’s no guarantee the justices will lean that way in this case.
We’ll keep you posted.
The case is Kasten v. Saint-Gobain, U.S. Supreme Crt., No. 09-834.
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