Lawsuit Against C. Caramanico & Sons Alleges Unpaid Overtime, Racial Discrimination

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C. Caramanico & Sons, Inc. is the defendant in a proposed class action lawsuit filed by a former landscaping employee who alleges he was not paid proper overtime wages and was discriminated against due to his Mexican heritage. 

The plaintiff, who worked for the defendant as a maintenance crew member and later as a foreman/crew leader from 2014 through November 2016, claims he regularly worked more than 40 hours per week but was never paid time-and-a-half overtime. The plaintiff argues that the alleged overtime violations stemmed, in part, from the defendant's failure to pay employees for time spent traveling from Caramanico’s headquarters to work sites and back at the beginning and end of each workday. 

The lawsuit later alleges that after the plaintiff complained about the supposed lack of overtime to the defendant’s accounting manager, he was told, with no explanation, that the money was in his paychecks. After repeated complaints to the president of the company, the plaintiff was fired, the lawsuit claims.

The complaint goes on to describe an incident that allegedly occurred on November 1, 2016 during which the plaintiff and his crew were the subjects of ethnically derogatory language used by a foreman for the defendant. The plaintiff alleges that later that day, the situation degraded into a physical altercation between him and the foreman, an incident allegedly witnessed by the company's president. The plaintiff was nevertheless fired, despite his co-workers reportedly corroborating the events, the lawsuit claims.