Mervyn’s Sued for Unpaid Overtime

Mervyn’s Department Store has been charged in two lawsuits with coercing 1,750 low-level managers at its California stores into working up to 80-hour weeks without overtime.

The suits, filed this week in Orange County Superior Court, seek a total of $111 million in back wages, plus at least that much in punitive damages.

One suit was filed on behalf of 1,300 clerical supervisors known as “team coordinators,” who were typically paid $10 to $11.50 an hour and were eligible for overtime under company policy.

The other suit affects about 450 salaried workers who earned about $40,000 a year and whom Mervyn’s deemed exempt from overtime. The suit says they should get the extra pay because nearly all their time was spent on nonsupervisory duties like stocking shelves and ringing up sales.

Mervyn’s California spokeswoman Carol Johnson said company officials are aware of the suits but won’t comment on pending litigation.

Mervyn’s parent company, Minneapolis-based Dayton Hudson Corp., was also named in the suits and officials there declined comment.

The suits listed two plaintiffs by name, a current and former employee of Mervyn’s Irvine store. Both suits seek to include all similar employees in California during the last three years as part of a class-action. California is Mervyn’s biggest market, with 127 stores.

If similar allegations turn up in other states, the suit could be refiled as a federal claim encompassing all 276 Mervyn’s stores in 15 states, said Robert W. Thompson of the Tustin law firm Callahan, McCune & Willis, a lawyer for the workers.

One of the suits contends that higher-ups at Mervyn’s and Dayton Hudson Corp. knew or should have known that the “team coordinators” routinely worked through lunch and rest breaks and had to take home paperwork.

Team coordinators, 10 to a store, are typically experienced sales clerks who led the worker “teams” in each Mervyn’s department. Their paperwork included schedules and reports on sales. Team leaders, three to each store, oversaw several departments. In practice, though, both jobs were mostly sales and stock work, the lawsuits contend.

The named plaintiff on one of the suits is Donald Priestly, who formerly worked at Mervyn’s Mission Viejo and Irvine stores. He is now employed by an automobile suspension company.

The suit filed on behalf of the salaried managers contends that the experience of Jill Hess, an “operations team leader” at the Irvine store, was typical.

It says she was required to work from 60 to 70 hours a week, and as many as 80 hours a week at peak sales time--but not as the supervisor she was supposed to be.

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The lawsuits come at a time of heavy pressure on legislators to relax state and federal overtime laws. But the arduous work shifts described by the Mervyn’s employees in the lawsuits would qualify for huge amounts of overtime under any foreseeable revision of the laws.

Another department store “off-the-clock” case charged that Nordstrom Inc. failed to pay its Washington state workers for time spent restocking inventory and writing thank-you notes to customers. The high-end Seattle chain settled in 1993 by agreeing to pay up to $4,000 each to tens of thousands of workers.

In another Seattle case, a jury this week found that Irvine-based Taco Bell Corp. coerced up to 13,000 workers into working unpaid overtime at its Washington state restaurants. Damages have yet to be determined in that case, and Taco Bell has said it will appeal the finding.

Off-the-clock litigation is “the wave of the future,” said Sheryl Willert, a Seattle labor lawyer who advises her business clients not to look the other way when employees voluntarily work through lunch breaks and after hours. “It’s not OK to allow employees to work overtime unless you pay them,” she said.

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Overtime Primer

Q. What overtime does current law require California employers to pay?

A. Hourly employees who work more than eight hours in one day or 40 hours in one week receive 1 1/2 times normal compensation for those hours. On the seventh day of work in a row, employees receive 1 1/2 times normal pay for the first eight hours and double normal pay after that. Employees working more than 12 hours in one day receive twice normal compensation for that time.

Q. Who is exempt from overtime?

A. One category includes executives and professionals such as doctors and lawyers--unless they perform lesser functions, like an attorney doing law-clerk work. Another is salaried managers who supervise two or more employees more than half the time. A third is salaried administrators whose jobs involve using their discretion and independent judgment most of the time.

Source: Employee rights attorney Don D. Sessions