The Supreme Court of the United States granted certiorari in a case involving hundreds of Taco Bell employees who say they’ve been illegally cheated out of overtime pay.
The group of more 500 plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit against Sundance, Inc. — a company that owns more than 150 Taco Bell franchises — over its wage and hour practices. Sundance argues that the case shouldn’t be heard by a judge, but rather, by an arbitrator. The aggrieved workers disagree, arguing that if Sundance wanted to arbitrate, it should have said so from the start.
The lawsuit’s lead plaintiff, Robyn Morgan, worked in Iowa as an hourly employee at a Taco Bell owned by Sundance. Morgan and the other plaintiffs allege that Sundance used a number of illegal wage and hour practices, such as forcing workers to clock out before the end of their shifts and “shifting” employees’ hours from the week they actually worked to the following week in order to deprive workers of overtime pay. Morgan and others brought a lawsuit in 2018 for violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) on behalf of all hourly employees of the company. The group wasn’t the first to raise Sundance’s employment practices in a lawsuit, either. A similar case had been filed in Michigan two years earlier by another group of employees.
After Morgan’s lawsuit was filed, typical litigation jousting ensued. Sundance filed a motion to dismiss (which was denied); later, the company filed an answer to Morgan’s complaint. The case...
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