Washington, D.C. (November 5, 2014) - The Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) Local 29F announced today that a $2.75 million settlement has been reached in its Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) grievance filed against the US Department of the Army, Corps of Engineers, Kansas City District.

Demonstrating its commitment to ensure that the Fair Labor Standards Act is fully complied with by all managers and supervisory personnel within the Agency, the union filed a grievance in February 2009 on behalf of all bargaining unit employees. The essence of the action, covering over one thousand employees, was that the employees were erroneously designated as exempt from the FLSA. The FLSA is a federal law protecting employees from being forced to work overtime without being properly compensated. Other key allegations included the denial of the choice of overtime payments in lieu of compensatory time, not properly compensating employees for travel time and failure to provide compensation for “off the clock” work, also known as suffer or permit overtime.

The terms of the settlement provide for the Agency to pay $2,750,000 to resolve claims by the union on behalf of current and former employees who were not compensated properly under the FLSA.  In addition, the Agency agreed that a significant number of employees previously declared FLSA exempt will, hereafter, be covered by the FLSA and properly compensated on a going-forward basis. 

The union expects that that the claims process will begin before the year’s end for all active, retired, deceased and separated Agency employees nationwide. Distributions should follow shortly thereafter. “This is a wonderful victory. It took many years of hard work to get to a point where the Union was able to recover millions of dollars on behalf of more than a thousand hard working employees,” said LIUNA General President Terry O’Sullivan.

LIUNA was represented in this case by the Law Offices of Snider & Associates, LLC, who has settled many similar cases nationwide. “The union fought hard to settle this matter,” said lead counsel Michael J. Snider, adding “this settlement will ensure that the Agency complies with the regulations under the FLSA and will protect both current and future employees.” “This resolution has been over five years in the making and eliminated the need for what would have surely been many additional years of protracted and costly litigation,” noted Snider & Associates attorney and senior litigator Keith Kauffman.

The claims process will be handled by Class Action Implementation Group (CAIG).  Any inquiries concerning the settlement and claims process must be made through CAIG’s website at: www.LiunaL29F.com (available on November 10, 2014).  L. 29F bargaining unit employees will be contacted by the end of the year by CAIG about how to apply to be part of the settlement. 

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