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Most employment laws include provisions protecting employees from vindictive managers who would otherwise punish them for exercising their rights. The Fair Labor Standards Act is no exception.
The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division takes the anti-retaliation provisions of the FLSA seriously enough that it released a fact sheet (WHD Fact Sheet #77A) in December stressing some of its rules and guidance about retaliating against employees.
In a nutshell, according to the agency fact sheet: employers may not discharge or discriminate against an employee who files an FLSA complaint regardless of whether the complaint is filed verbally or in writing; the retaliation provision applies to all employees, regardless of whether their work is covered by the FLSA; and an employee who is dismissed for filing a complaint may either file a retaliation charge with WHD or as a private cause of action.
A recent ruling illustrating how crucial some of those specifics can be for employers. At the end of January the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that internal complaints are also protected by the FLSA in a case that’s been working its way through the system for several years, Minor v. Bostwick Laboratories.
In Minor the defendant, Kathy Minor, alleged she was fired from her job as a medical technologist in 2007 after she and several colleagues filed a complaint claiming that their supervisor changed time sheets so that overtime hours weren’t represented.
The initial case was dismissed, but Minor appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. There’s been some debate in the courts over whether or not complaints that are filed orally and whether those only filed internally but not to a government agency are covered by the anti-retaliation protection of the FLSA. The Supreme Court held last year that oral complaints were covered in Kasten v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp. The Fourth Circuit found that internal complaints are also covered.