Tag Archives: FLSA

Retired First Deputy Fire Chief Gary Mogel has filed an FLSA lawsuit against his former employer, the City of Reading, Pennsylvania alleging the city violated the FLSA by failing to pay fire department shift commanders any overtime. This lawsuit is the latest of several recent lawsuits involving fire department shift commanders challenging their employer’s classification as “white-collar” overtime exempt employees. ...

A group of more than 1,000 Washington D.C., police officers filed a lawsuit earlier this week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia alleging the District has shorted the officers’ overtime rate during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the officers claim the District has failed to include hazardous duty pay in their regular rate of pay in violation ...

Fire Departments that utilize the FLSA’s §207(k) partial overtime exemption for cross-trained firefighter/EMTs should carefully review their policies and procedures following a recent court decision. The decision, which was handed down by U.S. District Court Judge Ada Brown, invalidated the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport’s Fire Department’s (DFWFD) use of the §207(k) exemption for cross-trained firefighter/EMTs assigned to the department’s EMS ...

Today’s FLSA Question: I am an HR manager for a medium sized city. We have a number of non-essential personnel, including several members of the police and fire department’s clerical staff, working from home due to the pandemic. Traditionally, these employees worked Monday-Friday, forty-hour per week schedules. Now, since these non-essential personnel are working from home, we have very little ...

Today’s FLSA Question: I am a fire chief for a mid-sized municipal fire department located in Texas. Myself and my assistant chief are enrolled in the FLSA class that you are offering on-line this week, however I have a quick question and I cannot wait until Tuesday for an answer. We just sent several of our firefighters to California to ...

Today’s FLSA Question: I am a newly appointed fire chief. I am very concerned about some of my department’s pay practices. In particular, payments made to firefighters for paramedic certification and longevity are not being included in their regular rate of pay. I want to resolve this issue. Based on my figures, we probably owe our firefighters around $60,000 in ...

The State of California has agreed to pay almost 2000 firefighters a total of $4.8 million in back pay after shortchanging their regular rate over the past several years. According to The Sacramento Bee, the back wages will be going to approximately 1,900 CalFire firefighters that received cash payments in lieu of accepting employer sponsored medical benefits from May 2015 ...

The U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Wage and Hour Division (WHD)—the arm of the DOL responsible for enforcing the FLSA—has announced a major policy shift related to liquidated damages in pre-litigation settlements following DOL investigations. As a result of this change, state and local government employers will likely be able to avoid any liquidated damages in the event a DOL ...

Lawyers representing the City of Martinsburg, West Virginia recently announced that the city will appeal a state court decision over holiday compensation for the city’s firefighters. In a February 2020 decision, Judge Laura Faircloth found as a matter of law [i.e. absent a trial], that the city’s holiday pay plan for its firefighters violated the West Virginia Wage Payment and ...

Today’s FLSA Question: I am a city human resources manager. Our city’s firefighters work 24 hours on-duty, followed by 48 hours off-duty for an average of 56 hours per week. Currently, the city utilizes a 27-day work period for line firefighters. However, our firefighters are paid bi-weekly. Therefore, firefighters frequently do not get paid for their overtime until two or ...