Two of Six Modeling Agencies in Labor Law Violations Lawsuit Tossed

In a recent labor law violations lawsuit, a judge has cleaned up the charges against potentially six modeling agencies whose former employees claim they were not paid for the use and reuse of their images.

In New York, a group of models brought labor law violations claims against six modeling agencies including Elite Model Management Corp., Major Model Management Inc., Wilhelmina International Ltd., Click Model Management Inc., MC2 Model and Talent Miami LLC and Next Management LLC.

The major issue at hand in the labor law violations lawsuit is that the models claim they were not paid for repeated use of their images. They claim that the modeling agencies collected usage and reuse fees from ad agencies and other companies who used images in television commercials and on products such as hair color boxes, but that the agencies did not pay the models for that work.

The judge in this case, New York Supreme Court Judge O. Peter Sherwood, however, removed two of the six modeling agencies from the labor law violations lawsuit.

He dismissed the claims regarding Elite Model and Major Model, concluding that the allegations against these two agencies do not fall within the six year statute of limitations for the initial complaint filed in 2013. He says that these claims dealt with models who no longer worked for the agencies after 2005 and were thus outside the statute of limitations.

The judge allowed the claims against the other four modeling agencies to stand because they accrued on or after Oct. 24, 2007 which is within the statute of limitations.

In addition to the unpaid usage fees, the models claim that the modeling agencies have committed labor law violations by not paying them proper overtime and minimum wages and by making unauthorized deductions from their paychecks.

The models also allege in this labor law violations lawsuit that the modeling agencies did not pay them to attend mandatory meetings, did not issue wage statements and that they delayed payment of wages.

Sherwood noted that under New York labor law, only wages are recoverable. He opined that usage fees should not be considered wages and because of this, the charges against Major and Elite should be thrown out.

Even though two agencies were thrown out of this labor law violations lawsuit, the attorneys for the plaintiffs believe that this is a good move because it further distinguished that the agencies were actual “employers” of the models.

This Labor Law Violations Lawsuit is Shanklin, et al. v. Wilhelmina Models Inc., et al., Case No. 653702/2013, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York.

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