When a business identifies an employee as a manager, he or she is classified as exempt; exempt, that is, from the wage and hour/overtime pay provisions of the Federal Labor Standards Act. But if the job duties turn out to be those of a nonexempt, or nonmanagement, employee, the business is in violation of the law.

Jason Vasil, a former assistant manager of a Dunham’s Sports store in Pennsylvania believes that’s what happened to him and many others who worked for the Michigan-based chain, so he is seeking class-action status for his lawsuit.

Unlike most management employees, Dunham’s assistant managers did not interview, hire, fire, conduct performance reviews or determine pay raises. Vasil says people with that title spent about 80% of their time running cash registers, assisting customers, stocking shelves, unloading trucks and performing light maintenance and janitorial duties.

That kind of work is not managerial, and it isn’t exempt from hourly pay, and the overtime that can accrue.

Vasil claims he regularly worked more than 40 hours a week, and often more than 50. He was paid a salary instead of an hourly wage for which he would have earned overtime.

In addition, Vasil says Dunham’s used assistant managers to establish new store locations, which required some of them to drive six to 20 hours from their own stores, working as many as 15 hours a day for as many as five days. No one received overtime, according to the lawsuit.

“The defendant utilized assistant store managers to perform this work as a way to reduce labor costs associated with the grand opening of a new store location,” it alleges.

Read the whole story by the Associated Press.