Starbucks Overtime Lawsuit

I've had lots of comments from people who read my post about the Family Dollar case. It was unusual because most FLSA cases involving the executive exemption are filed by assistant managers. The Family Dollar case involved store managers. This may be a trend, with Starbucks being the latest employer to run afoul wage and hour laws. The following is part of the article I came across:

Boca Raton, Fl: You can bet your double latte that some people are wondering why they took that management job at Starbucks. The high-end java shop has been slapped with yet another overtime lawsuit under the Fair Labor Standards Act—this time it’s the managers that are complaining that they were, as attorney Adam Chotiner describes it, “little more than glorified baristas." Chotiner believes that Starbucks has wrongly classified store managers as beingexempt from overtime. “We don’t believe they fit the exemption,” says Chotiner. “Their primary duty is to make coffee, sell coffee, serve coffee and clean the bathrooms just like the hourly employees they supposedly supervise. They should receive overtime pay for any hours they worked over 40 hours but they don’t.” Although Starbucks store managers get a little prestige from their title, Chotiner argues that’s about all they get that is different from the baristas. It may be that it simply doesn’t pay to be the coffee boss. “Certainly that is one of things we are going to explore. We think if you take their salary and divide it by the number of hours they really work,” Chotiner says, “you will find that on an hourly basis they make very similar to what the hourly employees make.”

You can read the full story at www.lawyersandsettlements.com/articles/12217/Adam-Chotiner-lawyer-interview.html