The nation’s largest credit union has 11,000 employees, but apparently not enough money — or, more likely, not enough honor — to pay some of its workers the overtime wages they earned.

The Navy Federal Credit Union, based in Virginia, has been sued by an employee in Nevada for failing to pay some of its branch workers for all of the hours they worked. Anthony Lee claims that he and others in his job classification were required to work “off the clock”; that is, they were performing job duties before and after their official shifts for as long as 30 to 45 minutes a day.

Lee’s been employed at the credit union for nearly six years as a member services representative. That job is not exempt, meaning it is not a management job that is compensated by a salary, no matter how many hours are worked in a given pay period. Nonexempt jobs, such as Lee’s are paid by the hour, and subject to overtime.

Lee, who also charges that a former manager referred to him by the “N” word several times, plans to seek class-action status for his complaint to enable as many as 500 other employees to join the lawsuit. He’s seeking a judgment that the alleged practice is illegal, and that it be stopped in the future. He also seeks unspecified damages, penalties and court costs.

Read the whole story in the Washington Business Journal.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) filed a lawsuit accusing officers who oversee benefit trust funds for cement workers of firing an employee because she cooperated with a criminal investigation of a local union leader. That’s illegal.

The lawsuit seeks to have Cheryle Robbins, the former audit and collections director for the funds, reinstated, with back pay and interest. The feds also asked the court to relieve several trust board members of their jobs, including Scott Brain, the head of the cement masons union.

“Workers must be free to participate in Department of Labor inquiries without fear of retaliation,” Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis C. Borzi said in a statement. “By law, they have a right to report suspected violations to the department and must be allowed to cooperate with investigators.”

DOL investigators had documents showing that the union head had supported efforts to place Robbins on leave in 2011 after she had raised concerns about millions of dollars in missing employer contributions to the trusts. The funds subsidize union members’ health care, retirement and other benefits.

Brain also has been investigated for allegations that he permitted employers to skip their payments to the funds, spent dues money on an extramarital affair and retaliated against whistle-blowers.

The union, in Southern California, has about 1,700 members.

Read the whole story on LATimes.com.

Most of the stories we tell in these pages are sorry tales of employers taking advantage of — that is, stealing from — employees. But in one recent case, the tables were turned: A worker allegedly stole from the boss, and got caught.

Richard K. Hissom had a job with Yellowstone County in Montana grading and maintaining roads. He was assigned a county pickup truck and road grader, and was supposed to report daily to his supervisor. But one day in April last year, another county employee driving past Hissom’s house saw the pickup and grader parked there during normal working hours. That worker reported the sighting to his supervisor.

The next day, Hissom reported in to his supervisor but said nothing about not working the previous day. Investigators claimed that he had lied about working on multiple road projects, and on several days when he did so, a GPS tracker on his county grader indicated it had not moved from Hissom’s residence.

Police detectives determined that Hissom was paid $6,935.08 for time that he did not work during a four-month period, and was charged with felony theft.

Read the whole story on BillingsGazette.com.

It’s bad enough that a worker at Cheeburger Cheeburger in New Jersey wasn’t paid the legally required time-and-a-half for the overtime hours she worked, but insult was added to her compensation injury when another worker sexually harassed her and her employer did nothing.

Irma Munoz de Gonzalez sued Phoenix Management Holdings, the franchising outfit that runs all three Cheeburger stores, for violating New Jersey wage and hour laws. She was paid $7.50 per hour when she began working at Cheeburger in August 2012, then got a raise to $8.25 per hour in December 2012. She worked at two of the restaurant’s locations through last July, but claimed she never received overtime pay for weekly periods in which she worked more than 40 hours.

“They tried to evade their obligations under federal and state laws by paying her [a] salary, and that’s just bogus,” her lawyer said.  “She was hired at an hourly rate, washing dishes, cutting salads. She was not a manager, administrator and not entitled to avoid the overtime rate of pay by calling it a salary.”

It’s illegal to escape overtime pay provisions by giving a nonexempt employee a salary instead of tracking hours.

De Gonzalez was paid by check for the first 40 hours of work, and the remainder in cash. That’s also a violation, because the company failed to provide her accurate statements showing hours worked, deductions, rates of pay and gross and net pay figures. She also complained to her bosses that her co-workers “created a hostile work environment,” which is why she eventually quit.

One time, she claims, a male co-worker placed a hot spatula against her arm because she refused his sexual advances. She also claims that twice she was injured on the job and didn’t get workers compensation benefits to which she was entitled.

Read the whole story on NJ.com.

For more than a year, the investigative news site ProPublica has been publishing a series of stories concerning temporary work in the U.S. The wide-ranging subjects, from regulations and policy to individual profiles of people struggling to make a living, paint a stark portrait of how critical temporary work is to the success of U.S. business, and how unfair it often is to the people who supply the labor.

Among the posts:

“Hummus Maker Warned of ‘Extreme Safety Risk’ Before Temp Worker’s Death,” reported in conjunction with The Boston Globe, shows how the employer knew about a safety problem but did nothing about it.

“A Modern Day ‘Harvest of Shame” explains how blue-collar temporary workers are abused much like migrant farmworkers were before the modern farm labor movement brought the issue to light.

“Temp Worker Regulations Around the World” illustrates weak U.S. labor protection for temp workers in comparison with the rest of the developed world.

“U.S. Lags Behind World in Temp Worker Protection” explains “permatemping,” another practice in which the U.S. engages while other countries limit the length of temporary jobs, guarantee equal pay and restrict dangerous work.

“Taken for a Ride: Temp Agencies and ‘Raiteros’ in Immigrant Chicago” depicts how prominent U.S. companies and large temp agencies benefit from — and tacitly collaborate with — an underworld of labor brokers called “raiteros,” who charge workers fees that push their compensation below minimum wage.

Read the whole series on ProPublica.org.

An Oregon nursery business shut down before the unpaid wage claims of more than 100 workers could be resolved. The state’s Bureau of Labor and Industries began investigating the nursery in January when the wage-hour claims began, and were piling up through mid-April.

The business — Leo Gentry Wholesale Nursery, which sold trees and shrubs to national retail outlets including Lowe’s and Home Depot — had been struggling since the recession. It had sought bankruptcy protection in 2012, emerged from it in 2013, but now its business operations have been assumed by a court-appointed receiver to liquidate its assets.

Oregon’s Wage Security Fund, which helps pay employees’ final wages when a business closes with insufficient funds, has paid out just over half — $125,000 — of the lost wages to six dozen former employees, but investigators are still processing claims from 50 people. An Oregon labor official said that so far, investigators have determined  that former employees are owed $239,400 collectively.

Read the whole story on OregonLive.com. 

Two large companies investigated by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) paid $277,565 in unpaid wages and liquidated damages for distribution to 224 workers.

Bayonne Dry Dock and Repair Corp. and Coastwide Material Supply Corp. engaged in ship repair, and had violated overtime provisions of the Walsh-Healey Contracts Act. It establishes minimum wage, maximum hours and safety and health standards for work on contracts in excess of $10,000 for the manufacturing or furnishing of materials, supplies, articles or equipment to the U.S. government.

Bayonne Dry Dock and Repair had a federal contract to repair and rehabilitate U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels. Coastwide Material Supply became a subcontractor on the contract, but they’re owned by the same outfit.

The DOL determined that the companies’ full-time employees (crew leaders) brought in temporary workers on an as-needed basis. They weren’t considered employees, and management failed to keep accurate and complete records for them, in addition to not paying overtime. That’s illegal no matter what your job classification.

Read the whole story on StaffingIndustry.com.

Last year, we blogged about two Major League Baseball teams under investigation by the Department of Labor for violating wage-and hour laws, and now, two more teams have joined that club.

The Baltimore Orioles and Oakland A’s are under scrutiny for paying clubhouse and administrative workers and interns less than the minimum wage or for not paying time-and-a-half after more than 40 hours of work in a week, as required by law.

The original two teams,  the Miami Marlins and San Francisco Giants, are settling the issue. The Marlins will pay $288,290 in back wages to 39 team employees, and damages. The Giants will pay $220,793 in back wages to 78 employees, ranging from $60 to $4,000 each, and damages.

Federal officials won’t disclose much about the Orioles and A’s cases because they’re open investigations, and team representatives also were silent.

The MLB commissioner does not control employment practices of individual teams, but he summoned representatives of all teams last autumn for a briefing by federal wage-and-hour officials.

Was anyone paying attention?

Read the whole story on FairWarning.org.

In the course of building a spiffy new campus in the United Arab Emirates, one lesson New York University taught, it seems, is how to exploit construction workers. In 2009 NYU issued a “statement of labor values” supposedly to guarantee fair treatment of workers, but project conditions, it seems, did not represent that ideal.

Although strikes are illegal in the UAE, where laborers recruited mostly from Asia are often indistinguishable from indentured servants, that’s exactly what happened last autumn.

A painter said he was promised a base pay of 1,500 dirham a month, or $408. Once on the job, his compensation turned out to be less than half that. Overtime raised it to 1,000 dirham, or $272, but food cost more than one-third of that.

The striking workers had to pay recruitment fees of as much as a year’s wages to get jobs, and weren’t reimbursed, despite NYU’s stated labor values that contractors are supposed to pay back all such fees. Most of the men said they worked 11 or 12 hours a day six or seven days a week just to earn close to what they had been promised, despite the NYU labor statement that overtime should be voluntary.

Some of the strikers, interviewed in their home countries, said they did not receive the right to redress labor disputes without “harassment, intimidation or retaliation.” This, of course, in one of the world’s wealthiest nations working with America’s largest private university.

NYU said the campus will uphold the university’s core values, from the treatment of workers to the protection of scholarly inquiry. Is forcing millions of immigrant workers to be tethered to the companies that sponsor their visas a core value?

University officials said they could not vouch for the treatment of individual construction workers because they’re not employed by the university, but by companies that work as contractors or subcontractors for the government agency overseeing the project.

We believe that wherever people work on your behalf, directly or indirectly, you have an obligation to protect their rights.

Read the whole story on NYTimes.com.

A recycling business that reportedly not only violated minimum wage and overtime pay laws, but threatened workers who were being treated like beasts of burden has agreed to fork over more than $74,000 in back wages and damages.

We wrote about the fear and intimidation tactics of Recycling Innovations and Valley Recycling last week in our blog “Fear Prevents Many Workers From Exercising Their Rights.”

The company’s owner, Karim Ameri, did not admit or deny committing the violations, which also included pressuring employees to lie to Department of Labor investigators looking into the matter. Late last year, federal authorities obtained a restraining order to prevent him from pressuring workers to mislead investigators or threatening to report them to immigration authorities if they cooperated with the investigation.

The company operates seven bottle-and-can redemption centers in the San Fernando Valley suburb of Los Angeles.

Last year the company paid workers $55 to $65 per day for 10-hour, six-day weeks, meaning that their pay fell below the California minimum wage of $8 per hour, as well as the federal minimum of $7.25. They were not paid the legally required time-and-a-half for overtime hours.

The investigation was spurred by Antonio Bernabe, a labor advocate for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA). He brought the complaint because the company’s Spanish-speaking employees were afraid to voice it.

Bernabe described the settlement as “a big win for labor rights,” but was disappointed that the company will be given 20 months to pay the 13 workers in full. When employers cheat workers of their pay, Bernabe said, they should “have to pay right away.”

Read the whole story on FairWarning.org.