In these times of serious belt-tightening, especially in the public sector, everyone is looking for ways to save money. Some are willing to take the risk of breaking the law to do it, and some of them get caught — and waste a lot more money as a result.
The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) took that risk. After shutting a bus garage for budgetary reasons, it laid off a lot of drivers and re-assigned a lot more to other garages. I bet the laid-off workers complained, but I also bet the CTA can claim business reasons for those layoffs.
But when the re-assigned drivers complained about not being paid overtime, CTA had no excuse.
Photo: Todd Leeuwenburgh
In agreeing to settle with the drivers, CTA will end up paying $350,000 just in attorney’s fees, plus more to the drivers in liquidated
damages. Oh, and there’s also the $300,000 to resolve the overtime claims. I don’t know about you, but that’s not my idea of cost savings.
In total, CTA is scheduled to pay the 1,100-plus plaintiffs $650,000 because it didn’t pay them overtime pay when it was due.
How did it happen? Well, after CTA shut down the garage, re-assigned the drivers and reconfigured many of its bus routes, it told all its
drivers that, in order to learn their new bus routes, they’d have to ride as passengers on the new routes — from start to finish, and then back again — a practice called “cushioning.” And it told the drivers to “cushion” outside their regular work hours, adding that if they asked to be paid overtime for those hours, they’d be disciplined.
The drivers sued in Reyes v. Chicago Transit Authority, claiming that CTA had violated the overtime requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Apparently, CTA saw the error of its ways, because, in a brief filed with the court, it said that it agreed that the settlement amount
“is based on a number of overtime cushioning hours determined to be reasonable by the attorneys for both parties.”
A judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois has given preliminary approval to the settlement, which he is
likely to rubber-stamp at a hearing on Aug. 1. (See Reyes v. Chicago Transit Authority, No. 10-cv-01311 (N.D. Ill. June 6, 2011).)