Legal news for employment attorneys. Former Amazon employee claims he and other employees are owed earned wages.
Employment attorneys alert- Former Amazon.com employee filed a lawsuit alleging he is owed unpaid overtime wages.
Reno, NV—A former Amazon.com distribution center employee claims the online retailer owes thousands of other employees nationwide including himself, millions of dollars in unpaid overtime wages. Richard Austin filed the class-action seeking lawsuit for all Amazon.com workers, late November in the U.S. District Court in Seattle, as reported by the San Jose Mercury News.
Richard Austin was an employee at Amazon’s distribution center in Fernley from September 2008 until the summer of 2009, when he says he was cheated out of appropriate compensation for his work. The employment lawsuit alleges Amazon is in violation of the federal fair labor standards due to the company’s time-clock system. Amazon’s time-clock system apparently rounds the start and end times to the nearest quarter-hour, which doesn’t account for early clock-in or any overtime under a quarter hour. In addition, employees reportedly were required to work “off the clock”, in which they need to be properly compensated for. Lawyers representing the plaintiff estimated Amazon employs 21,000 hourly workers at a typical hourly wage of $10, which accounts to nearly $21 million a year. Amazon.com had no comment on the pending litigation.
According to U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) http://www.dol.gov/ policy, companies are allowed to round start and end times to the nearest quarter hour, as long as through time, this doesn’t result in a “failure to compensate the employees properly for all the time they have actually worked.”
Legal News Reporter: Nicole Howley-Legal news for employment lawyers.
