James & Hoffman has a large and varied Wage and Hour practice, representing plaintiffs in individual and class actions under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”), Title V of the U.S. Code, and a number of other statutes and administrative regulations guaranteeing private and public employees fair and accurate compensation for the work they perform. In the largest of these cases, James & Hoffman, in conjunction with the law firm of Bernstein & Lipsett, P.C., has been litigating the FLSA claims of some 15,000 federal law enforcement personnel at a wide range of federal agencies since 1990. The majority of these claims have by now been successfully concluded, including recent settlements on behalf of Marine Enforcement Officers who worked at the United States Customs Service and now at the Department of Homeland Security, and GS-5 and GS-7 Criminal Investigators at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish & Wildlife Service, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and the Internal Revenue Service.
On September 21, 2007, the Court of Federal Claims ruled that criminal investigators at the GS-12 and GS-13 grades in the Offices of the Inspectors General at the Departments of Housing and Urban Development ("HUD") and Health and Human Services ("HHS") were entitled to FLSA pay and liquidated damages. The court issued two opinions, one for each agency, but they are, for all practical purposes, identical. The decisions should permit the resolution of the remaining criminal investigator cases at other agencies, including the FBI, NCIS, DCIS and a host of other agencies. The parties are now in settlement discussions aimed at resolving the remaining claims of criminal investigators and other law enforcement related positions, including a number of non-1811 positions at the Department of Homeland Security and its predecessor, the United States Customs Service.
On February 22, 2008, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) sent us a settlement proposal, which contained a number of objections regarding the claims of many criminal investigator plaintiffs whose claims remain to be settled. We are currently investigating the suspect assertions set forth in this latest settlement offer.
James & Hoffman will update this information as developments occur.
James & Hoffman’s Wage and Hour practice is not limited to law enforcement officers or even to public employees. In Heath v. Perdue Farms, James & Hoffman successfully represented a large number of “chicken catchers” in eastern Maryland, Virginia and Delaware who worked for Perdue but were unlawfully treated as independent contractors and not paid for their overtime.
James & Hoffman’s Wage and Hour practice reflects the firm’s strongly-held belief that all workers – no matter what their job is – deserve a fair and honest wage in return for their labor.
