Suit Says Dollar General Operating Co. Refuses to Pay OT Wages, Denies COBRA Rights

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Dolgen, LLC (trading as Dolgencorp, LLC) and Anthem Health Plans of Virginia, Inc. are facing claims that they misclassified managers as exempt from overtime wage requirements and denied an employee her COBRA rights.

The plaintiff in the case is a current manager of one of Dolgen’s Dollar General retail stores. In her proposed collective action, she claims the company refuses to pay its managers overtime wages even though 90% of their work is manual labor and most of their other duties do not qualify as exempt from overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act. According to the complaint, managers regularly work more than 40 hours per week and are paid less than 25 cents more per hour than non-exempt assistant managers who do receive overtime wages.

Even worse, the suit claims Dolgen knows its pay policies are illegal, as evidenced by the “voluminous litigation” filed against it in the past 10 years over its alleged misclassification of employees.

The plaintiff has also lodged an individual claim against both defendants, alleging she was wrongly denied insurance benefits when they failed to send her a required notice of her COBRA rights. She says she went on maternity leave in July 2016 and that Dolgen canceled her coverage under its health plan at the end of that month, before she gave birth to her child. In an alleged violation of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (COBRA), however, the defendants failed to send the plaintiff a notice of her insurance options and their “fiduciary obligations” to her, the suit says. As a result, she says she was left without insurance and incurred over $23,000 in medical debt due to complications with the birth of her child.