Judge Grants Class Certification to Centerline Workers Claiming Compensable Travel Time

A judge has granted class certification to Centerline workers who claim compensable travel time for long drives back from jobs.

Centerline employees have filed a class action lawsuit against the company for allegedly violating the Fair Labor Standards Act by not paying them overtime for long drives back from job sites.

U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs certified the workers as a class, determining that both tower technicians (lineworkers) and foremen (on-the-ground service technicians) should be considered as part of the same class as the overtime issue affects them similarly.

Speaking to Burroughs’ inclusion of both tower technicians and foremen in the class certification, the lineworkers’ attorney told Law360 that “the court recognized that slight differences among members of the class do not preclude conditional certification where all class members are subject to the same policy regarding payment of wages.”

Schwab went on to say that this class certification is significant because it “explicitly recognized that [the workers] need not submit affidavits in support of their motion for conditional certification in order to prevail.”

The tower technicians initially brought forward the Centerline compensable travel time lawsuit independent from the foremen. They requested class certification for tower technicians who worked for the company outside of Massachusetts, where the company’s headquarters are located, between Oct. 26, 2012 and April 20, 2016.

The Centerline drive time compensation class action lawsuit was initially filed by three lineworkers all from Pennsylvania. The three lineworkers sought compensation for lost wages, claiming that the company unlawfully refused to compensate employees for time spent traveling back from job sites.

According to the employees, they were paid for time spent driving to a job site, but were paid at their standard rate, never at an overtime rate.

However, the company allegedly refused to pay employees for return trips, even though the trips were allegedly often extremely long, and the employees were riding in Centerline-owned vehicles — the employees argued that this time should have also been compensable travel time.

The lineworkers state that the company did compensate them for return trips over 130 miles in distance, or if the lineworkers were subjected to traffic delays during their travel. Allegedly, this policy around travel compensation applied similarly to both lineworkers and foremen.

The employees state that Centerline’s practice of not compensating employees for all return trip drive time is a willful violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, and thus, the statute of limitation for requesting relief is three years.

In resistance to the Centerline overtime class action lawsuit, Centerline claims that their practice did not constitute a wrongdoing and did not violate the Fair Labor Standards Act. The company argues that the Fair Labor Standards Act does not require that a company compensate employees for travel time.

The Centerline Compensable Travel Time Class Action Lawsuit is Case No. 1:15-cv-13339, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

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