Employees Try to Recover Back Wages From Mervyn’s

The Mervyn’s department store chain has been accused in two lawsuits of 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 executives are aware of the lawsuits but won’t comment on pending litigation.

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

The suits list 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, a lawyer for the employees.

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.

The named plaintiff on it is Donald Priestly, who had worked at Mervyn’s Mission Viejo and Irvine stores. He is now employed by an automotive 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 between 60 and 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.

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 intends to appeal the finding.

Off-the-clock litigation is “the wave of the future,” said Sheryl Willert, a Seattle labor lawyer, adding, “It’s not OK to allow employees to work overtime unless you pay them.”