A motion has been filed in Virginia federal court to approve a settlement between a group of employees and the debt collector they work for that will see the collector pay $1.5 million after it was accused of not paying the employees for overtime that was worked.
A copy of the motion to approve the terms of the settlement in the case of Scott v. Portfolio Recovery Associates can be accessed by clicking here.
Each of the named plaintiffs will received $2,500 under the terms of the settlement, while the remaining members of the proposed class — as many as 8,000 current and former employees of the company — will split about $1 million. They include hourly employees who worked at least one week for the company dating back to 2017 in the defendant’s offices in California, Florida, Kansas, Alabama, Nevada, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The attorneys representing the plaintiffs will receive $500,000 if the settlement is approved.
The plaintiffs claim that they were not allowed to clock in to start working until they opened, logged into, and ensured that the software they needed to use to do their jobs was running correctly. That process, according to the complaint, could take as long as 25 minutes, for which the employees were not compensated. The complaint also accused the defendant of requiring its employees to log off their machines when going for lunch and then log back onto their machines when they return, which could take between one to three minutes each. The plaintiffs performed the logging out and logging back in during their unpaid lunch break, according to the complaint.
The suit is a consolidation of three different suits that were filed against the defendant which accused the defendant of not paying employees for overtime they worked, in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
The defendant denied all wrongdoing and liability in the proposed settlement agreement, but decided that continuing to defend itself would be “protracted and expensive.”
