Toyota’s Largest Worldwide Manufacturing Plant Hit with Unpaid Overtime Class/Collective Action

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Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. finds itself as the defendant in a proposed collective and class action filed on behalf of current and former production workers who the case claims are owed unpaid overtime wages.

The suit says the Georgetown, Kentucky-based defendant is Toyota’s largest vehicle manufacturing plant in the world. According to the lawsuit, the defendant has:

• Failed to pay production team members for pre-shift time spent attending mandatory meetings “directly related to their job,” amounting to roughly five minutes each day;
• Imposed unlawful automatic deductions of 45-minute meal breaks from production team members’ pay, even for shifts during which “they have not received a bona fide uninterrupted meal [break]”; and
• Failed to include non-discretionary performance bonus compensation in workers’ regular hourly rates of pay for the purpose of determining their hourly overtime pay rate.

Illuminating one instance of alleged wage and hour impropriety, the lawsuit says the defendant’s way to signal the beginning of a meal break was to ring a bell. The case claims, however, that production workers were required to continue their work during the start of the 45-minute unpaid lunch breaks until the assembly line had stopped, which could take anywhere from five to 10 minutes or longer.