Nurses Wage and Hour Lawsuit Wins Class Certification

A group of nurses at a Dallas hospital have been granted conditional class certification for alleged FLSA violations in a nurses wage and hour lawsuit.

In a new nurses wage and hour lawsuit, nurses from Methodist Hospitals of Dallas have claimed that their employer did not treat them fairly under the Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA.

The Fair Labor Standards Act is a federal law that determines how employers can treat their employees. It regulates overtime pay, hours worked, minimum wage, child labor, meal and rest breaks and recordkeeping.

In their nurses wage and hour lawsuit, the plaintiffs claim that Methodist Hospitals did not allow them their full meal breaks and instead, interrupted their rest times. However, the nurses claim, they were still docked pay for their lunch breaks even though, they believe, they were required to work during that time.

In this nurses wage and hour lawsuit, the plaintiffs have been granted conditional class certification that limits the Class to employees in three of the Methodist Hospitals of Dallas locations.

According to Law360, the nurses wage and hour lawsuit class is limited to the Dallas, Mansfield, and Charlton locations of the hospitals and applies to nurses who received a deduction for a 30-minute meal break regardless of whether or not it was actually taken.

Additionally, the court asked the hospital to give the names and addresses of the employees this may affect so that those employees can get notice of the nurses wage and hour lawsuit.

The court’s opinion read, “The potential class members here are similar because they report their time through the same system for every shift they work. The reporting variations across departments mean the proposed class members are not identical, but the differences are not significant enough to suggest the nurses are not similarly situated. But even if they were, how and whether the nurses reported missing their meal breaks has no bearing on whether they were subject to interruption during their meal breaks.”

The proposed class for this nurses wage and hour lawsuit includes all nurses who worked for Methodist Dallas Medical Center, Methodist Mansfield Medical Center or Methodist Charlton Medical Center in the last three years that had their pay docked when interrupted during a meal break.

One of the lead plaintiffs in this nurses wage and hour lawsuit, Robert S., told a court in 2017 that his meal breaks during his nursing shifts were often interrupted by doctors, other nurses or other hospital personnel with requests to respond to patient needs. On days this occurred, he said, his lunchtime would still be deducted from his pay.

The court determined that for this nurses wage and hour lawsuit, there were many nurses similarly situated and that a class action status would be warranted.

The Nurses Wage and Hour Lawsuit is Case No. 3:16-cv-02192, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division.

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