Wal-Mart Settles Another Massive Wage & Hour Claim

Walmart_1 We don’t do much wage and hour stuff on this blog because these cases tend to come down to whether nurses on standard-size ambulances are exempt from overtime pay.  But Wal-Mart sure got another lesson on why it should not ignore the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) (we previously wrote about this case here).

According to the BNA Daily Labor Report:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. . . . announced that it has agreed to pay up to $54.25 million to settle a class action lawsuit that had alleged that it had violated Minnesota’s labor laws by requiring employees to work off the clock during training (Braun v. Wal-Mart Inc., Minn. Dist. Ct., No. 19-CO-01-9790, settlement announced 12/9/08).

In addition to a multimillion dollar payout to workers, the settlement . . .  includes terms providing that the retailer will pay the state a civil penalty, an amount that is expected to be the largest wage and hour civil penalty in state history . . . .

I’m sure this settlement does not sit well with the cheap-skates over at Wal-Mart, but they got more where this one comes from, with an estimate of 80 such suits pending in 2007.

Mmm, maybe they could be even more profitable by not ripping off their employees on wages and benefits and avoiding all of this endless labor and employment litigation.

Just a thought.

Continue ReadingWal-Mart Settles Another Massive Wage & Hour Claim

ESOPS Likely to Suffer First in Tribune Bankruptcy

Graph_down Chicago is NOT the place to be these days (of course people from Milwaukee already know that) — especially if you are a corrupt politician or a financially-stressed newspaper. On the newspaper side of things — Elizabeth Dale (Florida) writes to tell us that the ESOP angle of the The Tribune Company bankruptcy is truly a mess.

She points us to this story from the New York Times Deal Book:

The possibility of a bankruptcy filing at Tribune Company is an embarrassing development for Samuel Zell, the real-estate mogul who took the media company private last December.

But it is likely that Tribune’s employees — or, more specifically, the employees’ stock-ownership plan — would take the first hit.

Because of the unusual structure of Tribune’s $8 billion buyout, Tribune’s employee stock-ownership plan holds 100 percent of Tribune’s common equity, regulatory filings show. Common stockholders are generally the first to take a loss in a bankruptcy restructuring, and they usually recover next to nothing.

Mr. Zell, by contrast, supplied mostly debt in the complex transaction, putting him higher in line to get paid. His $315 million investment in the Tribune deal consisted of a $225 million promissory note; the rest was for warrants to buy about 40 percent of Tribune’s stock in the future.

Great, another self-centered corporate CEO looking out for himself and screwing the employees of his company. I guess we should be thankful that at least he is not asking for a bail out.

More about this story here.

Cross posted at Workplace Prof Blog.

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How Family and Office Roles Mix

Simpsons_family_dynamic Interesting article on this topic in the NYT last week.

Some highlights:

THE office joker. The mother hen. The king. The rebel. The gossip. The peacekeeper. The dude.

Anyone who has ever been part of a workplace culture can probably recognize at least one of those characters in the cubicle next door.

But workplace roles and the dynamics among colleagues can go much deeper than those somewhat superficial stereotypes, especially in a nation where many people spend as much time with colleagues as they do with their families, where the office so often mirrors the family.

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