M&T Bank Agrees to $2.5M Settlement of Bank Employees Overtime Lawsuit

M&T Bank has agreed to a $2.5 million settlement for a bank employees overtime lawsuit filed by allegedly misclassified IT department employees.

In late March, lead plaintiff James S. asked a New York federal judge to approve the $2.49 million class action settlement. James’s motion said he represented 240 current or former IT employees and that to push for a better deal could place the plaintiffs of the bank employees overtime lawsuit at risk.

James is a former Analyst and Staff Specialist in a New York M&T Bank office. According to his bank employees overtime lawsuit, M&T bank was in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act and New York employment law.

The plaintiff sought to recover alleged unpaid overtime wages for himself and fellow IT workers who were paid a salary with no overtime pay, worked more than 40 hours a week, and were employed with the bank within the last six years.

Among the titles of employees from the Technology Infrastructure Department included in the bank employees overtime lawsuit were Network Computing Analyst I, Network Computing Analyst II, Senior Networking Computing Analyst, Staff Specialists, and Senior Staff Specialists who were employed since June 4, 2012.

The motion for settlement approval acknowledged that further litigation could be risk for the Class.

“First, although plaintiffs obtained conditional certification, maintaining the collective and certifying a class through trial may be difficult,” said the motion. “Defendant would likely argue that the differences among various job titles, departments and other individualized questions preclude class certification and would warrant decertification of the collective.”

The motion indicates that M&T Bank could have argued a computer exemption applied to the plaintiffs, which could have help them convince the court that overtime pay did not apply. Even though the plaintiffs don’t agree with that argument, they also understood that other defendants have successfully argued the point in other cases.

Schaefer’s motion also indicated the Class Members included M&T employees who worked in the technology area in New York anytime from August 2008 to December 2017 and those employees who worked in any other state between June 2012 and December 2017.

Schaefer said he worked at M&T Bank between March 2003 and October 2012, during which time he says he did not receive overtime pay because he allegedly was misclassified as exempt.

Job duties such as management roles, high-level decision-making responsibilities, and writing computer code or computer programming are sometimes able to qualify an employee as being exempt from overtime laws in the realm of computer professionals.

Classifying an employee as exempt requires the employment to meet a minimum weekly salary standard and satisfy other requirements regarding job duties. The bank employees overtime lawsuit alleged that M&T Bank did not pass the job duties portion of the test, resulting in violations of the FLSA and of New York Labor Law.

The bank employees overtime lawsuit included a filing with the court that asked for plaintiff attorney’s fees equal to a third of the gross settlement fund in addition to plaintiff’s attorney’s expenses of $10,000 and fees for the settlement claims administrator.

The Bank Employees Overtime Lawsuit is Case No. 1:14-cv-06622 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

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