Plaintiff Renews Bid for Boeing Unpaid Overtime Class Certification

An employee of Boeing has made a renewed bid for unpaid overtime class certification in a lawsuit that alleges the aerospace company misclassified him as an exempt employee and thus did not appropriately pay him and other class members for overtime pay they deserved.

This renewed bid comes a month after a Washington federal judge initially ruled that Plaintiff Marvin Mann did not meet qualifications for class certification.

In response to the judge’s ruling, Mann redefined the proposed class by narrowing its potential members.

Bid for Unpaid Overtime Class Certification

Mann works as a production line supervisor and is classified as a Level K manager.

Referred to as a “first-line leader,” Mann says he belongs to the lowest of three tiers of non-executive managers at the company.

Mann is employed at the Boeing facility in Everett, Washington and supervises a number of employees who assemble the Boeing 777 aircraft.

The newest proposed class for unpaid overtime class certification currently excludes assembly workers who worked on the Boeing 777X aircraft.

Additionally, other workers were excluded if they held positions in the Boeing production system or had positions involving cross operational initiatives (including tactical manager positions).

The new proposed class for unpaid overtime class certification also excluded employees working as supervisors whose principal responsibilities included those related to quality control, staffing, tooling or training, according to the latest bid for unpaid overtime class certification.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Robert S. Lasnik rejected Mann’s bid for unpaid overtime class certification, ruling that Mann’s identified class was too broad in that it attempted to represent all employees who had worked for Boeing in Washington state as a first-line leader in the 777 program’s manufacturing and production department since Sept. 22, 2012.

The initial class action lawsuit and concurrent bid for unpaid overtime class certification was initially filed in early 2014 against Boeing when Mann alleged that the company stopped paying certain level K managers for the additional overtime hours that they had worked in violation of state wage and hour laws in Washington state.

Initially, Boeing paid first-line leader employees a premium of $6.50 for any overtime hours worked in a week greater than 40 hours through the 2013 calendar year, according to Mann.

However, Boeing allegedly changed the policy to say that these same leaders would earn “flex” time off that could be used within the pay period. Mann stated that the program director in charge of the 777 employees disallowed the use of flex time in early 2014.

Boeing maintains that its Level K managers were exempt for overtime pay because they acted in “executive and/or administrative capacities” and this exempted them from receiving overtime pay under state law.

Boeing also took issue with the initial unpaid overtime class certification bid made by Mann, saying that his lawsuit essentially referred to hundreds of other managers as “glorified clerks.”

“Mann’s description of his own experience is impossible, but the merits of his claim are not before the court,” Boeing said in its opposition to unpaid overtime class certification. “True or not as to Mann himself, Mann’s description of the 777 manager role cannot be generalized to the class he seeks to represent. That proposed class is highly diverse, in testimony from almost 20 potential class members contradicts Mann’s superficial generalizations about the first-line manager job.”

Boeing went on to argue that Mann’s argument that the thousands of performed their duties without any intervention or oversight from managers was like “an orchestra performing the most complex symphony imaginable without a conductor.”

“The evidence belies this fantasy,” Boeing wrote in its opposition to the bid for unpaid overtime class certification. “At best, Mann describes the 777 first-line manager who is new to the job and still learning his way, or an incompetent. Even if the proposed class includes a few such outliers, they are not the norm. If they were, Boeing could not possibly complete almost 100 of these staggeringly complex, high-tech airplanes every year.”

The Boeing Unpaid Overtime Lawsuit is Mann v. The Boing Co., Case No. 1507, in the U.S. District Court for Western District of Washington.

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