A federal district judge in Texas recently granted a motion for conditional certification in an unpaid overtime case brought by oilfield workers.\u00a0 The case was filed by several former employees of Select Energy Services.\u00a0 The workers, who had been safety coordinators for the company, claimed that Select Energy, which provides services to oilfield operators, failed to pay them overtime despite working in excess of forty hours per week, which the plaintiffs alleged constituted a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA.<\/p>\n
The FLSA requires employers to pay their non-exempt employees one-and-a-half times their regular rate of pay for each hour worked in excess of forty per week.\u00a0 The FLSA allows claims for unpaid overtime to be filed by a worker \u201con behalf of himself\u2026[a]nd other employees similarly situated.\u201d\u00a0 The statute creates an \u201copt-in\u201d scheme which allows other workers to affirmatively notify the court that they desire to become parties to the unpaid overtime suit.\u00a0 Before notice is sent to other, similarly situated workers, a court must first decide whether the case should be certified as a collective action.\u00a0 While there is some debate as to what standard a court should use when determining whether to certify a case as a collective action under the FLSA, most courts, particularly in the Fifth Circuit, utilize the two-stage analysis.<\/p>\n
Under this two-stage analysis:<\/p>\n
The plaintiffs in the Select Energy case filed a motion to conditionally certify their case as a collective action.\u00a0 The Court noted that at this initial stage, there is a \u201cfairly lenient standard\u201d due to the lack of evidence available during the first stage.\u00a0 Instead, the Court should determine whether to conditionally certify a case as a collective action \u201cbased only on the pleadings and any affidavits which have been submitted.\u201d\u00a0 The Court found that the plaintiffs had satisfied their burden to conditionally certify the case as a collective action citing evidence that the defendant paid a flat salary for all hours worked, that other plaintiffs had joined the lawsuit since it was filed, and that the plaintiffs identified other potential plaintiffs who performed the same job and were paid in the same fashion.\u00a0 Accordingly, the Court conditionally certified the unpaid overtime case as a collective action under the FLSA and ordered the parties to submit a joint proposed notice to potential opt-in plaintiffs within ten days of the order.<\/p>\n
About the author:<\/strong> Josh Borsellino represents workers to get them the unpaid overtime they earned. \u00a0If you have questions about unpaid overtime, call 817.908.9861 or 432.242.7118 or fill out this\u00a0form<\/a>\u00a0for a free evaluation of your overtime issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A federal district judge in Texas recently granted a motion for conditional certification in an unpaid overtime case brought by oilfield workers.\u00a0 The case was filed by several former employees of Select Energy Services.\u00a0 The workers, who had been safety coordinators for the company, claimed that Select Energy, which provides services to oilfield operators, failed…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3886,3895,3896],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"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=743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}