Buckeye Reporter

WASHINGTON, D.C. –  U.S. Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) demand answers from 23 companies that appear to have committed wage theft by denying low-wage workers overtime pay by abusing the label “manager.” The senators sent letters to 23 companies identified in a recent report as having the highest proportion of positions used to strategically avoid paying workers overtime –– Bojangles, 84Lumber, Arby’s, Sonic Drive-in, Spencer’s, Weis markets, Pizza Hut, Domino’s Pizza, Combined Insurance, Jiffy Lube, Popeyes, Burger King, GNC, H&R Block, Life Time Fitness, Dairy Queen, Boston Market, Mainsource Bank, Subway Sandwiches, Jimmy John’s, Little Caesars, Crossmark, OfficeMax, and KFC – and called on each company to immediately cease its overtime evasion practices and answer questions regarding its tactics of “managerial” titles to avoid paying workers overtime.

“Firms appear to have systematically misclassified workers that spend the majority of their time performing manual labor tasks as managers—using titles like ‘director of first impressions’ and ‘assistant bingo manager’ – to deny them billions of dollars in overtime pay… By ‘provid[ing] salaries just above the federal cutoff to frontline workers and mislabel[ling] them as managers,’ [each company] appears to have committed wage theft by evading its statutory duty to pay workers what they have earned,” wrote the senators. 

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 prevents workers from being forced to work excessive hours without additional compensation: if covered employees work more than 40 hours in a given work week, they must receive overtime pay at one-and-a-half times their regular pay rate. Salaried employees who earn less than the federal overtime threshold of $35,568 annually are automatically eligible for overtime pay. However, the FLSA overtime guarantee does not apply to workers with salaries above that threshold and bona fide “managers”: executive, administrative, and professional employees. 

 The senators wrote to 23 companies identified by a recent National Bureau of Economic Research report as having the highest proportion of “manager” positions at just above the federal overtime salary threshold used to strategically avoid paying workers overtime. Given these serious concerns, Senators Brown and Warren are demanding each company immediately stop its wage theft tactics and pay their employees the overtime pay they have earned. They are asking each company to respond to a set of questions about the scope of its use of “managerial” titles and corresponding salaries and provide information about its overtime spending by July 11, 2023.

In March, Brown introduced the Restoring Overtime Pay Act of 2023 to raise the federal overtime threshold– which makes millions of additional American workers eligible for overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours a week – ensuring that when workers put in extra hours, they get the extra pay they’ve earned.

Senator Brown has led the fight to expand overtime pay for millions of Americans who are working long hours without fair pay. In 2015, he pushed the Obama administration to adopt a new rule that would increase the overtime salary threshold, and helped announce the new rule in Ohio in 2016. This rule was blocked by a federal judge in 2016 who issued a nationwide injunction that effectively denied 4.2 million workers overtime benefits. When the Trump administration proposed a new rule that would have set the overtime salary threshold at $35,000 -- down from $47,476 set by the Obama administration -- Senator Brown led the fight against the proposal.

In 2017, Brown first introduced legislation to guarantee expanded overtime pay, regardless of who is in the White House, and he has continued to push for legislation since then.

Most recently, Senator Brown has urged the Biden administration to take strong action to restore overtime pay protections for millions of workers.

The full text of the letters can be found HERE.

Original source can be found here.