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.
We have submitted a proposed settlement agreement to the government for approval by the Attorney General on behalf of those plaintiffs who have reviewed their calculation and sent us their authorization forms. Government counsel has indicated that he is preparing a memorandum for submission to the Attorney General recommending that the settlement be approved. He anticipates submitting the memorandum to the AG in the near future. Thank you for your continued patience.
In early 2010, we reached agreement with DOJ on the settlement amounts for backpay and liquidated damages for the remaining 1811 and 1812 plaintiffs. Pursuant to a new procedure mandated by DOJ, we have sent out the proposed settlement amounts for approval by the remaining plaintiffs in those two series, principally IG and IG-like criminal investigators and criminal investigators who worked for the FBI.
The settlement was complicated by the fact that DCIS regularly underpaid its agents for AUO, and claims for the underpayment of AUO have 6 year rather than 2-3 year statute of limitations. After running many calculations on the amount of the unpaid AUO, we made a settlement proposal to DOJ, which decided that DCIS plaintiffs could either accept the FLSA settlement amount or litigate their AUO and the FLSA claims. Most DCIS plaintiffs elected to waive their AUO claim. While this process took several months, once we heard from the DCIS plaintiffs, the settlement was ready for DOJ final approval. NCIS, likely prodded by DOJ, elected to recalculate the amount DOJ had informally agreed upon as a settlement for the NCIS plaintiffs on the basis that many of the NCIS plaintiffs were not within the United States and a limited number of other geographical areas covered by the FLSA. (This belated dispute comes after we spent nearly two year disputing the exempt status of certain of its GS-12 plaintiffs and negotiating over the amount of AUO worked by NCIS agents within the FLSA time period.) We understand that the NCIS claims have been temporarily severed from the settlement that has now gone up for final approval within DOJ. This process has been long and tortured, and, as of the date of this update, September 1, 2010, we await final approval as well as a resolution of the NCIS dispute.
We are also working on settlement proposals for the non-1811 criminal investigators who worked at the United States Customs Service ("USCS") and the Department of Homeland Security ("DHS"), and for the investigators who worked at the Office of Personnel Management ("OPM").
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.
