Kauff’s Transportation Systems Facing Wage and Hour Suit Over Alleged Misclassification of Employees as OT-Exempt

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The companies and individuals who run Kauff’s Transportation Systems and Kauff’s Towing and Transportation face a lawsuit filed by a former office employee who claims she never received proper time-and-a-half overtime pay.

Filed against Kauff’s, Inc., Guardian Fleet Services, Inc. and one individual, the lawsuit says the plaintiff worked for the defendants as a non-exempt hourly employee who received time-and-a-half overtime until roughly July 2014. According to the lawsuit, it was around August 2014 that the defendants hired a controller who claimed that the companies were paying their employees too much, advising that they switch proposed class members and other non-OT-exempt workers to exempt status as a cost-saving measure. As the lawsuit tells it, employees effectively had to work “longer and harder” without commensurate wages. From the complaint:

“Inexplicably, and unlawfully, before the period covered by the claim in this lawsuit, Kauff’s and [the individual defendant] arbitrarily decided to reclassify (and, therefore, misclassify) [the plaintiff] and many other similarly situated employees, as ‘exempt’ so that they could reduce the total amount of compensation to which she was rightly entitled and so that they could require [the plaintiff] to work longer and harder without having to pay her more money, or pay her at an overtime rate. [The individual defendant] sat down with each employee and told the employee he/she would be changed to a salaried employee such that overtime would no longer be paid when he/she worked more than 40 hours in a workweek.”

Even after defendant Guardian came into possession of the company, the suit adds, the alleged improper OT-classification of proposed class members continued. The plaintiff claims at no time were employees told not to work overtime, as there existed “an expectation to get the work done, no matter how long it took.” The lawsuit estimates the plaintiff is owed nearly $100,000  in unpaid overtime wages.