General Contractor Forsgren Failed to Pay Employees Proper Wages, Lawsuit Claims

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Forsgren, Inc. faces a proposed class and collective action that alleges the general contractor has failed to pay employees proper wages for every hour worked.

According to the 16-page case, the company maintains a practice of rounding employees’ clock-in and clock-out times in its favor and failing to include certain bonuses in the calculations of the workers’ overtime rates. As a result, the suit says, employees incur several hours of unpaid work per month and are paid at a lower time-and-a-half overtime rate than they are entitled to under state and federal law.

Forsgren provides services that include asphalt paving, cold milling, site preparation, utility and drainage installation and directional boring, the case states. Per the suit, employees who work for the contractor record their hours through an electronic time clock that enters their recorded work time into the defendant’s payroll system. The case alleges, however, that Forsgren’s payroll system rounds down the employees’ hours in favor of the defendant.

“For example,” the complaint says, “if an hourly-paid employee clocked out at 5:11 p.m., the payroll system recorded his or her end time as 5:00 p.m. Likewise, if an hourly-paid employee clocked in at 7:51 a.m., Defendant’s payroll system recorded his or her start time as 8:00 a.m.”

The defendant’s timekeeping system therefore failed to accurately record employees’ hours and caused them to incur several hours of unpaid work per month, according to the suit. 

The case goes on to relay that workers were paid non-discretionary cash awards and bonuses “on a regular basis when certain objective and measurable criteria were met.” Per the suit, the defendant improperly failed to include the unpaid time that was rounded out by the payroll system when calculating workers’ bonuses.

Moreover, employees’ bonuses and cash awards were not included as part of their regular pay rates when their time-and-a-half overtime rates were calculated, the lawsuit alleges.

“Section 778.208 of Title 29 of the Code of Federal Regulations requires that nondiscretionary bonuses, such as production or attendance based incentives, ‘must be totaled in with other earnings to determine the regular rate on which overtime pay must be based,’” the complaint reads.

The plaintiff, who worked at Forsgen’s principle office in Fort Smith, Arkansas, claims the defendant’s pay practices were part of a centralized policy implemented across all of its facilities.

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