A Win For Former Employees
Martin & Bonnett Obtains Summary Judgment for Former SimonMed Field Service Engineers
A federal district court in Phoenix, Arizona granted summary judgment to a group of former Field Service Engineers who worked for SimonMed Imaging, a medical imaging company that operates in nine states.
Represented by Martin & Bonnett, PLLC the Field Service Engineers argued that SimonMed had misclassified them as exempt employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and failed to pay required overtime wages in violation of the FLSA and state law. The Field Service Engineers’ main job duties involved repairing and performing maintenance on medical diagnostic and imaging equipment. Judge John J. Tuchi found that the Plaintiffs were not exempt employees under the FLSA “Learned Professional” exemption, had been misclassified, and therefore were entitled to overtime pay.
In an important determination, the Court ruled that SimonMed could not rely on the “fluctuating workweek” method of calculating overtime pay, a method that calculates the hourly rate of overtime pay at half of the employee’s regular hourly rate of pay. Rather, SimonMed must pay the Field Service Engineers overtime at the prescribed “time and a half” rate for all hours worked over 40 in a workweek. Disagreeing with the reasoning of several Circuit Court opinions across the country, and instead siding with other District Courts in the Ninth Circuit, Judge Tuchi found that the fluctuating workweek does not apply in the misclassification context. The Court’s opinion provides a thorough review and analysis of why the fluctuating workweek does not apply where employees have been misclassified as exempt from the FLSA’s overtime provisions. The Court’s Opinion is available here.
The case is Ader, et al., v. SimonMed Imaging Inc., et al, No. cv-17-02085 pending in the United States District Court for the District of Arizona. Additional news coverage of the case and the Court’s summary judgment decision can be found at Bloomberg Law: SimonMed Technicians Win Some Overtime Claims, Advance Others.