Pursuant to the company’s employee handbook, all “hourly paid” employees were expected to accurately record each day their “time worked,” meaning “the time actually spent on the job performing job-related duties.” The employee handbook also required all overtime to be approved in advance and that nonexempt employees would “receive time and one-half their regular rate of pay for all hours worked over 40 during any one workweek,” but the company in practice paid all nonexempt employees for all overtime hours worked, regardless of whether approval for overtime was obtained in advance.
The worker bringing the suit testified that he regularly reported working between 40 and 45 hours per week as a full-time Field Service Technician although he actually worked between 45 and 55 hours per week and was not compensated for all of the hours he worked; he acknowledges that he did not keep track of the hours he actually worked in any way and that he assumed that the company kept such a record by reviewing the GPS records of his service vehicle. He testified that he decided which overtime hours to report into the system based upon whether there were “projects going on that would involve expected overtime” and depending upon “how much grief over overtime [he] was getting.” He also maintained that he did not report all of the overtime he worked because he believed he needed “a very good reason” to be paid for overtime work to finish his expected service calls and because his evaluations were partially based on completing service in a timely manner. The worker and a co-worker said that the company required them to include a 30-minute unpaid lunch break on their time sheets each day even though they routinely took service calls during lunch.
The employer said the claimant’s “willingness to regularly record a substantial amount of overtime completely undermines his claim that he worked uncompensated overtime,” and that it had no actual or constructive knowledge of the employee’s uncompensated work and because he cannot sufficiently demonstrate how much unpaid work he performed.
The court sends the case to a trial, stating that there are genuine issues of material fact as to the accuracy of the time sheets pertaining to work performed during unpaid lunch breaks, and whether the company knew or should have known about the off-the-clock work the employee was performing. Frew v. Tolt Technologies Service Group, LLC
