Collective Action Claims Verizon Retailer Victra Failed to Pay Proper Wages

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A proposed class and collective action claims ABC Phones of North Carolina, Inc., which does business as Victra, failed to pay employees for all hours worked and did not properly calculate workers’ overtime wages.

According to the case, Victra is a North Carolina-headquartered authorized Verizon Wireless dealer that operates more than 1,000 stores across 46 states. Filed by a former store manager, the lawsuit alleges that while Victra paid employees a combination of hourly wages, profit-based commissions and non-discretionary bonuses related to job performance, the retailer failed to include the latter two in workers’ regular hourly rates for the purpose of determining overtime pay. The case claims the result was that Victra failed to pay proper time-and-a-half overtime for hours worked in excess of 40 each week.

Moreover, the case claims Victra employees did not receive proper straight-time pay for every hour worked as the result of off-the-clock work. According to the suit, current and former Victra workers were paid by the defendant for work done only while clocked into a store’s timekeeping system.

With regard to the lead plaintiff, the lawsuit says the man worked for the defendant as a store manager and was regularly required to participate in telephonic conference calls with upper management, sometimes taking place outside of the store, for which he was not paid. The plaintiff further claims that even though he and other employees “frequently did not take any meal breaks during their work days,” the defendant’s upper management would add unpaid meal breaks to employees’ time records. When employees did clock out for meal breaks, their breaks were often less than 30 minutes long, the case says, which under Wisconsin law must be counted as hours worked.

Further still, Victra, according to the lawsuit, routinely adjusted the plaintiff’s timesheet to reflect fewer hours than he actually worked. The complaint contends that the defendant violated both the FLSA and Wisconsin law by failing to pay for meal breaks and off-the-clock work.

The lawsuit looks to represent current and former hourly paid ABC Phones employees who worked for the company in Wisconsin on or after November 8, 2017.