JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Former employees of Publix filed a federal lawsuit against the supermarket on Thursday claiming they were required to work overtime hours without getting paid.
According to the lawsuit filed by former hourly assistant department managers who worked in Tennessee, Florida and Georgia, they performed work off-the-clock both inside and outside of the store without compensation and were denied overtime pay. They said the unpaid work outside of their 40-hour shift included walking the department with supervisors, cleaning, organizing, stocking and assisting customers.
READ: Publix Collective Action Complaint
The employees also claimed they would clock out for meal breaks but were routinely interrupted during unpaid breaks to handle work matters like answering text messages.
They estimated that they worked an average of five unpaid overtime hours per workweek or more for years, according to the lawsuit, and they want Publix to pay them back as well as damages.
The lawsuit proposes a collective action under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act to include similarly affected employees who worked within the past three years across Publix’s 1,300 locations throughout the Southeast. Any affected Publix assistant department managers can join the collective action.
According to a news release by Morgan & Morgan and Shavitz Law Group, they represent and have been contacted by dozens of affected employees who worked in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina who experienced the same issues.
“Every year, according to the Economic Policy Institute, American workers lose as much as $50 billion per year to wage theft. Our clients have experienced something many workers face as we all become reachable on our phones at any time of day or night — that companies expect employees to be in constant communication but fail to track this time worked. It’s unacceptable to force hourly workers to work outside of their shifts and to not pay workers for their time. We believe that the assistant department managers’ allegations only scratch the surface of Publix off-the-clock conditions. We will work to uncover all the evidence about the extent of these alleged harmful practices in order to hold Publix accountable and recover every possible dollar of these workers’ rightfully earned money,” Gregg Shavitz said.
News4JAX emailed Publix to get their reaction to the lawsuit and a spokesperson sent a statement:
Ryan Morgan is one of the attorneys representing former assistant managers at Publix.
“When you start doing the math, it becomes tens of millions of dollars,” Morgan said. “Let’s just take the deli, for example. There’s a, there’s a deli, department manager, and then there’s going to be an assistant department manager, and then you’re going to have, you know, the regular daily deli workers. And so what the assistants have some responsibility for is obviously troubleshooting things that come up during the day anything from ‘Hey, we’re out of Boar’s Head, you know, oven gold chicken, we need to find some more, maybe we have to go get it from another store. Maybe we need to, you know, it’s in the back it to scheduling issues, to customer complaints.’”
Morgan said the employees they’ve talked to typically made in the low to mid $20 an-hour range.
“What really struck me about this...it’s a very, just a widespread accepted part of their culture, unfortunately,” he said.
News4JAX asked Jacksonville labor and employment attorney Tad Delegal, who is not affiliated with the case, what the plaintiffs will have to do to prove their case.
“The standards are pretty deferential to plaintiff’s to employees. And it’s really the employer’s responsibility to keep the records. So if the employer has not kept the records, courts will generally permit employees to testify or provide evidence about how many hours they’ve worked,” Delegal said.
He said not everyone is owed overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act, there are exemptions, including for employees who make a salary of more than about $36,000 a year and those who are in executive or administrative roles.
Delegal said anyone who is a non-exempt employee and doing overtime and not getting paid for it, there are steps you can take.
“You can go to the Department of Labor Department of Labor and it will pursue an overtime claim on your behalf. Or you can go to an attorney,” he said.
