A federal court jury recently required East Penn Manufacturing Co. to pay $22.25 million for wage and hour violations, the largest recorded jury verdict under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), according to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL).
The DOL will ask the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to award an equal amount in liquidated damages for the affected workers and an order requiring future FLSA compliance by the manufacturer.
The DOL sued East Penn, alleging the company failed to pay 11,400 employees who worked at its battery plants in Lyons Station, Pa., between November 2014 and September 2021 for all the time they spent putting on protective clothing at the beginning of their shifts and undressing and showering at the end of their shifts. East Penn is a private, nonunionized company that manufactures and recycles batteries.
The DOL claimed East Penn did not pay employees based on their actual clock-in and clock-out times. Instead, it adjusted times to pay employees only for their scheduled shifts.
"Decades of settled law states that employers must pay employees for all hours worked, and this includes the time employees spend changing into and out of uniforms and showering where such activities, as here, were necessary and indispensable to their work. Contrary to the law, East Penn allowed employees to work off-the-clock for years," said U.S. Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda. "The jury's verdict will go a long way toward making the...
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