A federal court has ordered the City of Pittsburgh to pay $825,000 in liquidated damages alone to more than 900 municipal police officers. (O’Hara v. City of Pittsburgh.)
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania made the award following a five-year delay by the city in implementing
a 2006 letter of understanding between the city and the police officers, in which the city agreed to pay back overtime due under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
In the January 2006 letter of understanding, the city also agreed that it would include shift differentials at a 3 percent rate, as well as longevity pay, in the officers’ compensation going forward.
In December 2009, the plaintiffs filed suit to recover back overtime not yet paid, as well as to impose liquidated damages. The city paid
the officers back overtime due in March 2011.
However, the case remained open. Following a nonjury trial, Judge Donetta W. Ambrose recently ruled that the city had not met its burden of showing that its overtime violations had been made “in good faith and that [it] had reasonable grounds for believing that [its] act or omission was not a violation” of the FLSA (29 U.S.C. §260).
The court found that the city’s five-year delay in administering the letter of understanding, plus partial payments it had made during
that period, demonstrated a lack of good faith in complying with the FLSA’s overtime provisions, triggering a mandatory award of liquidated damages under the act (29 U.S.C. §216(b)).
Wrote the court: “The good faith requirement is a subjective one that ‘requires that the employer have an honest intention to ascertain and follow the dictates of the Act’” (emphasis supplied).
The lawsuit was filed by Dan O’Hara, a police officer and president of the Fort Pitt Lodge No. 1 of the Fraternal Order of Police, on behalf of himself and the other officers. (O’Hara v. City of Pittsburgh, Sept. 9, 2011).