Workers win OT case against Tyson, but who’ll get paid is an open question

by Tim Gould

The Supreme Court has broadened the way employees can file class action suits to settle wage-and-hour disputes.  

The court recently sided with 3,300 workers at an Iowa pork processing facility who claimed their employer, Tyson Foods, owed them overtime for putting on and taking off the protective equipment required by their jobs.

A lower court had awarded the workers about $6 million. The case before the Supreme Court centered around whether the workers had properly been granted class status and whether the plaintiffs could use a statistical analysis to prove they were entitled to the overtime pay.

The employees claimed they weren’t paid for donning and doffing their protective gear, which protected them from injury as they slaughtered hogs and prepared them for shipment at the Tyson facility in Storm Lake, IA..

Since Tyson didn’t keep records of the time spent donning and doffing, the employees relied on a study performed by an industrial relations expert who, according to a Wall Streeet Journal blog, set the average time spent at about 20 minutes per day.  The researchers then paired that data with workers’ time sheets.

Tyson’s lawyers argued that the analysis was faulty, given the differences between the time various employees might spend in the donning/doffing process, and the fact that the data included workers who hadn’t worked any overtime.

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