In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in the number of wage and hour cases brought by current or former employees against employers. These cases allege violations of:
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA);
State and local analogues of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA);
Davis Bacon Act;
State and local analogues of the Davis Bacon Act;
Employment Contracts;
Collective Bargaining Agreements
Most of our work on wage and hour claims for both plaintiffs and defendants has involved the measurement of economic damages resulting from alleged violations. In many cases we have calculated damages resulting from an employer’s inappropriate classification of non-exempt employees as exempt employees under the FLSA. Estimation of damages is often challenging in these cases because records of hours worked are often incomplete or nonexistent. We have sometimes addressed this challenge by relying on time clock data, security card swipe data, payroll data, work logs, production records, or affidavits and testimony from individual plaintiffs or supervisors. We have also addressed liability issues, using statistical tests to see if time clock data edited by an employer are systematically different from the original data recorded by employees.
Econsult has also measured damages associated with allegedly incorrect interpretations of overtime regulations, unreported work time, and failure to pay minimum or prevailing wages as required by law. We have also addressed issues of liquidated damages, compound pre-judgment interest, and simple pre-judgment interest.
Analyses of wage and hour claims often require extensive analyses of multi-file employer-provided data sets that are large, poorly documented, incomplete, incorrect, internally inconsistent, or contradictory of deposition testimony or other representations. Econsult personnel are well prepared to address such problems because Econsult has more than three decades of experience performing expert analyses of employer’s data with similar problems in the context of employment discrimination litigation.
