Lawsuits surge as employees demand payment for overtime

NEW YORK -- There were years, Omar Belazi says, when he willingly logged 65-hour weeks, stayed late to vacuum the store's floor and clean the bathroom, and surrendered his Sundays to hit sales targets.

But a decade later he grew tired of waiting for the payback.

"It gets to be very stressful, very tiring. You just get up and go to RadioShack and go home and go to sleep," said Belazi, a former store manager for the electronics chain in Santa Barbara, Calif. "They gave me all these awards, but it didn't do me any good. They didn't pay me."

A growing number of workers like Belazi are demanding more from their employers. The result: a flood of lawsuits by employees, many in arguably "professional" jobs, who accuse their companies of cheating them out of overtime pay.

The surge in claims is part of an intensifying debate over overtime pay and who is entitled to it.

Stretching productivity

In part, the debate reflects the fact that Americans are working more hours -- longer than their counterparts in every other industrialized country -- and that employers are trying to stretch productivity. But it also hinges on changes in the jobs people do and what those jobs are called.

With manufacturing jobs dwindling, more workers now toil for service-industry employers who pay salaries and give people hard-to-define titles like "analyst," "manager" and "administrator."

Federal law says employers do not have to pay overtime to salaried workers in executive, administrative or professional jobs. But the law, the Fair Labor Standards Act, has undergone only limited revision since the 1970s. It relies on some outdated salary figures and terminology that leaves room for broad interpretation.

And employers and employees have had some different ideas about what is a professional and what constitutes fair pay.

RadioShack agreed in July to pay $29.9 million to settle a lawsuit led by Belazi on behalf of 1,300 current and former California store managers. The workers contended they were owed overtime because the company made virtually all managerial decisions at higher levels, and mandated that they spend most of their hours as salesmen.

"It's become the cause of action du jour in California," said Mark Hill, senior vice president for RadioShack, which has denied any wrongdoing and notes that its store managers' average pay is $60,000 a year. "These are not underpaid hourly workers."