In recent years, the number of actions filed under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by current and former employees seeking to recover alleged unpaid wages and overtime payments from their employers has increased rapidly. More than 7,000 FLSA actions were filed in federal courts in 2011 alone, a record number, and more than three times as many as were filed a mere 10 years before.
This is an astonishing increase, considering that the substantive rights under the FLSA have remained relatively unchanged since 1938. As FLSA litigation continues to surge, calculating damages has been litigated more frequently. One disputed method for calculating damages frequently arises in cases where salaried employees assert claims that they were misclassified as exempt from the FLSA, in so-called “misclassification actions.”
