Lawsuit Claims Citrix Sales Reps Denied Proper Wages for Overtime, Off-the-Clock Work

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A former Citrix Systems Inc. employee alleges in a lawsuit that she and other workers were not paid for time spent performing mandatory pre- and post-shift work and denied proper overtime wages.

The proposed collective and class action further alleges Citrix failed to inform the plaintiff, a former inside sales rep at the company’s Raleigh, North Carolina location, of her rights under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and retaliated against the woman after a workplace injury required her to work from home for an extended period of time. Ultimately, the plaintiff, who worked for Citrix from July 2018 to January 2020, was wrongfully terminated, the suit claims.

The amended complaint, filed October 1, 2020, alleges Citrix, a software development company with more than 8,100 global workers, including more than 2,000 inside sales reps at its Raleigh location, overstepped both the Fair Labor Standards Act and North Carolina state law by failing to properly pay its workers and retaliating against the plaintiff.

Per the case, Citrix schedules workers for eight-hour shifts with a one-hour lunch break five days per week, and requires employees to report only scheduled shift times on their timesheets regardless of how many hours they actually work. The lawsuit alleges that employees, in reality, put in between 50 and 65 hours per week in order to meet the defendant’s expectations. 

More specifically, the plaintiff says she and other sales reps arrived at work 10 or 15 minutes before their scheduled shift start times to log into various computer programs, check emails and perform other tasks required to become “work ready.” Moreover, employees were often required to work through their unpaid lunch breaks in order to, say, continue assisting a client or present a demonstration of Citrix’s products to a prospective customer, the case alleges. The plaintiff claims she typically worked through her lunch break three days per week.

By the end of each shift, sales reps are “rarely” able to finish their phone calls with clients, shut down their work station, and leave at the scheduled end of their day, the lawsuit attests. Instead, workers often performed post-shift tasks, including shutting down computers, completing paperwork, sending emails and following up with clients and prospective customers, including those in other time zones, according to the case. Per the suit, sales reps sometimes put in an additional three hours of work after the end of their scheduled shifts.

The lawsuit relays that inside sales representatives were told in January 2019 that they would no longer be paid on a salary basis but instead at an hourly rate plus the same commission structure that was already in place. According to the complaint, however, workers were only permitted to document their scheduled hours on timesheets, regardless of any additional hours worked.

As a result, inside sales reps were not paid for significant amounts of off-the-clock work, including pre- and post-shift work and time spent working through lunch breaks, put in each week, the suit says.

The lawsuit goes on to allege that when Citrix calculated employees’ overtime rates, it failed to include nondiscretionary commissions as part of the workers’ regular rates of pay, which reduced their time-and-a-half overtime wages.

“By failing to include commissions in calculating the regular rate of pay Plaintiffs receive for overtime purposes, Defendant reduces the cost of overtime in violation of federal and state wage and hour laws,” the complaint states.

With regard to her allegation of wrongful termination, the plaintiff claims she was wrongfully fired by Citrix after she complained of a hostile work environment caused by her manager, suffered a workplace injury and requested a work-from-home accommodation. According to the suit, Citrix’s representatives never informed the plaintiff of her right to request FMLA leave despite the emotional distress she suffered, and instead told her that taking a leave of absence would result in a 70-percent pay cut. The plaintiff says she was ultimately terminated after requesting and receiving a work-from-home accommodation even though she continued meeting or exceeding sales quotas.

Initially filed in North Carolina’s Western District Court, the lawsuit was transferred to the state’s Eastern District on February 24, 2021.

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