Staples Settles Overtime Claims for $38 Million
Another day, another multi-million-dollar wage and hour settlement.
Office supply giant Staples Inc. has agreed to pay $38 million to settle overtime claims brought by managers in its California stores who alleged that they were misclassified as exempt executive employees. The class includes between 1,500 and 2,000 employees who worked for Staples over a period of twelve years.
The “managers” claimed that they exercised virtually no independent discretion and spent more than half their time performing non-exempt work such as working the cash register, cleaning, assisting customers, processing deliveries and stocking shelves.
Staples admitted no wrongdoing but said that it settled to “avoid further expense and distraction from litigation that has been ongoing for the past eight years.”
The lesson? Once again, one of the very best things you can do to avoid big-ticket liability is to review exempt/non-exempt classifications to ensure that they are 100% solid under the law. Courts (and plaintiffs’ attorneys) continue to be very hard on employers where there’s even a hint of employee misclassification.
