Wells Tellers File Lawsuit Alleging Unpaid Wages
Five current or former tellers at a Wells Fargo & Co. branch in Duarte contend in a lawsuit filed this week that the largest California-based bank routinely failed to pay its tellers for all the hours they worked.
The suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, seeks allegedly unpaid wages, interest and punitive damages on behalf of thousands of tellers who have worked at Wells Fargo branches in California since Nov. 3, 1999. If a judge certifies it as a class action, it would be the latest in a series of unpaid-wage actions filed in recent years against well-known retailers, restaurant chains and other businesses.
Wells Fargo, based in San Francisco, had 862 offices in California as of Oct. 30, second only to Bank of America Corp.’s 1,027, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. In another unpaid-wages case, Bank of America agreed two years ago to pay $22 million to about 6,000 employees it had misclassified as exempt from overtime.
The starting pay for Southern California bank tellers was about $9 an hour and full-time tellers averaged about $22,000 a year as of the third quarter of 2002, according to a survey published by the Labor Department.
Many tellers are part-time workers. Wells Fargo employs the equivalent of 4,400 full-time tellers at its branches in California, spokeswoman Mary Trigg said Friday.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit include full-time and part-time tellers. According to the lawsuit, Wells Fargo had them work “off the clock” before and after their shifts; didn’t pay overtime when they worked more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week; failed to provide them with state-mandated breaks for meals and rests; and required them to work at weekend swap meets and attend training sessions without compensation.
Trigg, who said the bank generally did not discuss legal matters, declined to comment on the allegations.
The tellers at the Duarte branch were Johanna Osinga, Mari-Kristi Brown, Sakineh Sima Alamdari, Kareen Yu and Lorena Sann. Their attorneys couldn’t be reached for comment Friday.
There is evidence that growing numbers of businesses are failing to pay workers all they are owed. The Labor Department’s wage and hour division recovered more than $175 million in back wages in fiscal 2002, 33% more than in 2001 and the largest amount collected in the last 10 years.
The number of workers receiving back wages increased by 21%, and the agency completed 40,264 compliance actions, 6% more than the 38,051 completed actions in fiscal 2001.
Hundreds of private lawsuits have accused companies in recent years of systematically underpaying workers, often by misclassifying white-collar employees as managers who were exempt from being paid overtime.
In one such suit, an Alameda County jury in July 2001 ordered Los Angeles-based Farmers Insurance Exchange to pay $90 million for cheating claims adjusters out of years of overtime pay.
Other suits were more like the one involving Wells Fargo, alleging that companies encouraged or tolerated off-the-clock work by employees who were paid hourly wages.
The companies that have settled private class-action suits accusing them of cheating on wages include Taco Bell, a division of Yum Brands Inc.; United Parcel Service Inc.; RadioShack Corp.; and Starbucks Corp.
