No Escape From the Long Arm of DOL

Even state agencies are not immune from the U.S. Department of Labor’s ongoing aggressive enforcement actions, as reflected in a recent lawsuit filed against the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services’ Child Protective Services Division (CPS).
The lawsuit is seeking more than $1 million for back overtime pay that DOL claims is owed 800 current and former CPS investigators and caseworkers under the Fair Labor Standards Act. In addition, DOL is seeking liquidated damages, claiming the Division’s FLSA overtime violations were willful.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, follows an investigation by DOL’s Wage and Hour Division that began in June 2008.
The suit claims that CPS required employees to work off the clock and that CPS supervisors instructed employees not to record all their hours worked. The lawsuit also claims that the agency failed to maintain recordkeeping as required under the FLSA.
“Civil servants entrusted with the important job of protecting Texas’ children were forced to relinquish their wage protections,” Labor Secretary Hilda Solis charged in a press release.
Retorted Julie Moody, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, in a statement, the Texas agency “strongly den[ies] the allegations made [in DOL’s press release]. In discussions leading up to the lawsuit, the federal government has failed to prove that Child Protective Services in fact owes any overtime to its workers, and has consistently refused our offer of complete access to our personnel records.”
Moody added that “CPS employs hundreds of investigators across the state …. While the unique and mobile nature of their daily routines are challenging, the agency has policies and controls in place to ensure that our workers are properly credited with all time worked, and are paid overtime in compliance with the law.”
While the U.S. Supreme Court virtually eliminated the right of individual workers to file FLSA lawsuits against states under the doctrine of sovereign immunity, this prohibition does not extend to the federal government (Alden v. Maine (119 S. Ct. 2240 (1999). (Solis v. State of Texas, Texas Dep’t of Family and Protective Servs., Child Protection Div., No. 1:11-cv-469 (W.D. Tex. June 8, 2011)