Chief Judge Donetta Ambrose of the Western District of Pennsylvania recently granted conditional certification on behalf of an FLSA class of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania hospital workers in Kuznyetsov v. West Penn Allegheny Health System, Inc., 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 47163 (W.D. Pa. June 1, 2009).  There, the hospitals made an automatic 30-minute pay deduction for meal breaks.  See id. at *12-14.  The hospitals also required that employees who work during meal breaks report their work to the timekeeper so that the 30-minute deduction could be altered.  See id. at 13.  Based on these policies, Chief Judge Ambrose conditionally certified the FLSA class.  After emphasizing that it is the employer’s duty to affirmatively ensure that work is not performed during meal breaks, see id. at 14, the Court conditionally certified the class on grounds that “[a]rguably, [the hospitals'] policies shift the responsibility to the employees” in violation of the FLSA, id. at 14.  At the conditional certification stage, it did not matter that the hospitals had offered evidence of thousands of instances in which automatic deductions were cancelled.  See id.  Such evidence did not “alter[] the fact that the policies apply to all non-exempt employees and arguably shifts the responsibility to the employees to ensure that the deduction is cancelled.”  Id. at *15-16.Our law firm currently is representing hospital workers who allegedly were denied their full meal breaks in Philadelphia.  Feel free to give us a call if you have any questions or would like to discuss the legal rights of you or your clients.

In June 2008, Western District of Pennsylvania Chief Judge Donetta W. Ambrose handed workers a mixed decision in a Pittsburgh-area overtime lawsuit entitled Andrako v. United States Steel Corp., 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 52235 (W.D. Pa. June 22, 2009).  Here is the tally of the district court’s rulings:  (i) the protective items worn by the coke manufacturing plant employees constitute “clothing” under FLSA Section 3(o); (ii) the employees’ post-shift showering is covered by FLSA Section 3(o); (iii) the pre-shift and post-shift walking time is not covered by either FLSA Section 3(o) and does not constitute preliminary or postliminary activities under the the Portal-to-Portal Act; and (iv) the employees were not required to exhaust the union grievance process prior to filing suit because their legal claims stemmed from the FLSA rather than the collective bargaining agreement.  Two of the cases discussed extensivy by Judge Ambrose were handled by WLF.  The first case is In re Cargill Meat Solutions Wage & Hour Litig., where our overtime attorneys represented hundreds of workers from Hazleton, Pennsylvania (Luzerne County), and Wyalusing, Pennsylvania (Bradford County) who sought straight-time overtime pay for their donning, doffing, washing, and travel activities.  The second case is Gatewood v. Koch Foods of Mississippi, where we represent hundreds of Mississippi poultry workers with similar claims.  The Andreko opinion is a must-read for overtime lawyers and attorneys from Pittsburgh and elsewhere.