Butch\u2019s Rat Hole & Anchor Service, Inc., has been sued in federal court in Midland, Texas two former employees represented by Borsellino, P.C. for alleged overtime violations.\u00a0 Butch\u2019s is an oilfield service company that claims to have, along with its affiliated companies, \u201cover 950 employees in five states.\u201d\u00a0 Butch\u2019s provides various oilfield services, including casing services, which involves laying tubing that is set inside a drilled well to protect and support the wellstream.\u00a0 Casing stabilizes the well and prevents it from caving in on itself.\u00a0 Plaintiffs were employed as members of a casing crew while employed at Butch\u2019s. One of the Plaintiffs performed most of his work in the Permian Basin, in the Midland-Odessa area and in eastern New Mexico. \u00a0 The other Plaintiff worked in the San Angelo area.\u00a0 The overtime pay lawsuit alleges that while employed by Defendant, Plaintiffs routinely worked at least 80-100 hours per week.\u00a0 Defendant paid Plaintiffs a combination of \u201cFootage Pay,\u201d \u201cLocation Pay,\u201d a salary, and at times overtime pay.\u00a0 The wage suit further alleges that Butch\u2019s allotted a certain number of hours for its workers to lay pipe (also referred to as \u201crunning casing\u201d) on each customer\u2019s project, based on Defendant\u2019s estimate that workers can lay approximately 1,000 feet of pipe per hour.\u00a0 Defendant added some additional hours to each bid to allow time for \u201crigging up and rigging down.\u201d\u00a0 The oilfield overtime suit further alleges that the total number of hours bid gave Defendant the maximum \u201cFootage Pay\u201d it would pay out to Plaintiffs, as if the project exceeded this set number of bid hours, Defendant then paid Plaintiffs the hourly \u201cLocation Hours Pay\u201d rate for all hours worked over the bid hours. However, Defendant failed to account when calculating Plaintiffs\u2019 overtime pay for various types of down time, including (1) travel time between jobs and from the yard to a job site; (2) preliminary and postliminary work, such as loading and unloading Defendant\u2019s trucks and other pre-job assignments both at the yard and the job site; and (3) wait time in which Plaintiffs were required to wait at job sites without the ability to leave said job sites before they could begin their jobs.<\/p>\r\n
Oilfield workers are often wrongfully denied overtime pay.\u00a0 Specifically, oil and gas companies often deny their oilfield workers pay for things like travel time, loading, unloading and other \u201csetup time,\u201d and\/or wait time or shop time.\u00a0 Oil and gas companies also sometimes attempt to pay their workers \u201cfootage pay\u201d or other piece-rate type payment systems that are based on estimates of how many hours it might take a worker to complete a project.\u00a0 Such payment systems often violate federal and\/or state overtime laws.\u00a0 If you or a friend or family member have not been paid overtime by a consulting company, an oilfield service company, oil and gas producer, or pipeline inspection company, consult an experienced overtime attorney to learn your legal rights.<\/p>\r\n
About the author:<\/b>\u00a0Josh Borsellino is a Texas overtime attorney who represents workers for unpaid overtime. \u00a0For a free consultation, call 817.908.9861 or 432.242.7118 or complete this online contact\u00a0form<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Butch\u2019s Rat Hole & Anchor Service, Inc., has been sued in federal court in Midland, Texas two former employees represented by Borsellino, P.C. for alleged overtime violations.\u00a0 Butch\u2019s is an oilfield service company that claims to have, along with its affiliated companies, \u201cover 950 employees in five states.\u201d\u00a0 Butch\u2019s provides various oilfield services, including casing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1103"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}