Tag Archives: §7(k)

The City of Virginia Beach, Virginia has agreed to a $200,000 settlement with 8 Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Captains following a November 2020 lawsuit for unpaid overtime. The captains alleged the city misclassified them as overtime exempt “white collar” employees in violation of the FLSA and Virginia state law. The terms of the settlement require the city to pay a ...

An FLSA overtime lawsuit filed last fall by a retired deputy fire chief will continue following a recent federal court ruling. Retired First Deputy Fire Chief Gary Mogel filed the lawsuit in September 2020, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Mogel alleges in his lawsuit that his employer, the City of Reading Pennsylvania, failed to ...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has upheld a lower court’s finding that in order to utilize the FLSA’s §207(k) partial overtime exemption, a fire department must establish a qualifying work period. This story began back in January 2020 when former Highland Hills, Ohio firefighter David Vance filed an FLSA lawsuit against his former employer. Vance’s allegations ...

A United States Magistrate Judge has ruled in the favor of more than 450 Kansas City, Missouri firefighters following their FLSA lawsuit against the city. In a 2019 lawsuit, Kansas City firefighters claimed the city failed to include a wide range of wage augments in their overtime rate of pay. The FLSA requires “all remuneration for employment paid to, or ...

Today’s FLSA Question: I am the fire chief of a full-time paid municipal fire department. Several of our firefighters and officers have been voluntarily attending on-campus classes in several different programs offered through the National Fire Academy (NFA). As a policy, the department provides these members with paid time off (without using vacation time or requiring shift trades) for all ...

Firefighters from Georgetown County, South Carolina are again attempting to raise public awareness regarding the ongoing critical firefighter and paramedic staffing shortage within the county. The Georgetown Professional Firefighters Association, Local 4526, has posted a three-page letter on its Facebook page that provides examples of how the “critical staffing shortage” is impacting the firefighters ability to serve the community. According ...

Today’s FLSA Question: I am the fire chief of a full-time paid fire department with seven stations. Firefighters bid by seniority to a preferred station. We utilize an out-of-rank system to fill most vacancies within the officer ranks. This out-of-rank system requires senior firefighters to move up and cover vacant officer positions. This can result in firefighters being required to ...

The Department of Labor (DOL) made an announcement today, March 28, 2019 that it has begun the formal review process necessary to make changes to various regulations pertaining to the regular rate of pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The notice and comment period for these changes will run from today until May 28, 2019. At that time ...

In what is likely to be the first of several legal decisions involving fire department shift commanders and Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) overtime eligibility, eight current and former Vancouver, Washington battalion chiefs (BCs) have lost their bids for FLSA overtime. This litigation began almost two years ago, after a small group of current and former BCs filed a federal ...

Cathedral City, California, is the latest city to face allegations of unpaid overtime from one of its firefighters. Corey Goddard, an engineer/paramedic for the Cathedral City Fire Department, filed a federal lawsuit this week alleging his employer [Cathedral City] failed to include all remuneration in his and other firefighters’ regular rate of pay in violation of the FLSA. In the ...