One unfair pay violation is bad enough. What’s worse is that it gives the Department of Labor (DOL) an excuse to go snooping through all of a company’s pay records.
From there, penalties can snowball fast — potentially crippling an employer.
Example: Complaints filed by cement truck drivers from the CEMEX, Inc.’s Tampa, FL, facility sparked a multi-state investigation that wound up costing the company
$1.5 million.
What happened? Drivers working out of the Florida facility claimed they weren’t being paid overtime for the time they worked past 40 hours in a workweek — and it turns out they were right.
That gave the feds an excuse to dig into all of the company’s pay records, which spanned facilities in seven other states.
The multi-state investigation opened an even bigger can of worms. The DOL discovered large-scale overtime violations under the company’s “pay-per-load” system. In total, 1,705 employees were due payments totaling $1,514,449.
In a settlement, CEMEX agreed to pay the back wages in full — and should it violate the Fair Labor Standards Act again, it’ll face contempt of court charges.
