Fitness club chain 24 Hour Fitness is the subject of a gender and racial discrimination lawsuit filed by the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and a California-based law firm.  The lawsuit claims that 24 Hour Fitness discriminates against its employees based on race and gender.  There are a total of six plaintiffs named in the lawsuit. 

According to the lawsuit, black, Hispanic or Asian and female employees at 24 Hour Fitness find that there's a glass ceiling whenever they apply for higher-paying jobs at the company.  They claim there are no specified criteria for promotions at the company.   Rather, they suggest, these decisions are arbitrary, and are usually made by white men.  The lawsuit also alleges that managers who are nonwhite, are paid lower salaries than white employees. 

The lawsuit is seeking lost wages and damages. It is also seeking class-action status.  If the lawsuit gains class-action status, then it could include more than 10,000 ethnic and female employees at the chain.  According to the plaintiffs, this practice of discrimination at 24-Hour Fitness is found across the country. 24-Hour Fitness is based in San Ramon, California, and has about 400 clubs across 17 states.

You would think that in the 21st century, workplace discrimination based on employees’ race or gender would be unthinkable.  Unfortunately, California employment discrimination attorneys continue to come across such discriminatory practices. Federal and California laws forbid such racial or gender discrimination.   Under California laws, discriminating on the basis of ethnicity or race in any matters that are related to the person’s terms of employment is prohibited.  These terms of employment can include the person’s salary, hours of work, vacation, overtime and other factors.  Not only that, employers are expressly forbidden from discriminating right from the time they place advertisements for positions in the company, through interviews, hiring, transfers and promotions.

It isn't everyday that Los Angeles workplace discrimination lawyers come across a lawsuit that involves gender, religious and pregnancy discrimination, all-in-one. An Omaha woman has filed a lawsuit against her former employer, alleging that she was fired because the employer believed her unborn child had “negative energy.”

The lawsuit has been filed by Jammie Harms who worked for Hearthstone Homes, as an executive assistant to the chief executive officer, John Smith. Smith and several other executives at the company practiced what they called “intuitive spirituality.”  At Hearthstone Homes, the employer's religious beliefs about reincarnation and energy fields were used to make business decisions.

The problems for Harms began when she announced her pregnancy in March 2009. According to her, Smith had a phone consultation with a psychic to discuss his executive assistant’s “disconnect” with her unborn child. Smith seem to be particularly concerned about whether the psychic “had energy” about Harms. He was concerned about whether negative energy was being created in the office because Harms had a male boss versus a female boss. In June, Harms’ services were terminated. In September, she delivered a baby boy.

In her lawsuit, she alleges gender, pregnancy and religious discrimination, and is seeking unspecified damages. She's also asking for a jury trial.

The lawsuit has opened a can of worms about unusual practices at Hearthstone Homes. According to former employees who are now coming out to speak about their experiences at the company, the company pressured employees into taking part in Mind-Body and Energy sessions. The company insisted that the sessions were good for the company, and enhanced productivity. Harms says that she resisted the pressure to take part in the sessions.

In 2007, a federal court ruled in favor of a former employee at Hearthstone Homes, who claimed he was fired because he resisted the pressure to participate in the Mind-Body Energy sessions.

As promised, federal and local government agencies across the country are getting tough on misclassification. And according to America's workers, it's about time. Misclassification is a practice that can potentially cheat employees out of wages, promotions and benefits. This dangerous, illegal habit of misclassifying workers as "independent contractors" has become an epidemic in the American workforce. A recent case in the nation's Northeast proves both the problem's seriousness and its pervasiveness.

This week, as congress is inches away from passing legislation that penalizes businesses for misclassification, a New Hampshire construction company was cited by the state's Attorney General Martha Coaklye's office. All-Pro Construction Management was cited for misclassifying its workers as independent contractors on construction projects throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The company also was cited for failure to maintain true and accurate general payroll records, failure to make timely payment of wages and failure to submit true and accurate certified records of payroll on public construction projects.

The owners of the company have agreed to pay the state a $25,000 penalty. All-Pro Construction Management also will be barred from bidding or doing work on any new public Massachusetts projects for the next six months. The attorney general's office received a complaint in November 2009 that claimed All-Pro was misclassifying their workers as independent contractors. Further investigation by the office revealed that the company also was paying its employees illegally. The employees would receive half of their weekly wages by payroll check and the other half of the wages at the end of the month by company check that failed to deduct taxes. Finally, the state discovered that All-Pro submitted inaccurate certified payroll records to five different Massachusetts contract-rewarding authorities, stating that the company paid all of their employees' wages on a weekly basis.

These are tough times for many American workers. Companies are doing everything they can to cut corners and save money. Unemployment is high, wages are stagnant, and job security is nil. Everyone's feeling the pinch, and it's a tense time for both management and labor. Workers need to feel that their sacrifices are worth it, and management has to be able make its numbers. In Chicago, tension is building and it looks like things might get ugly… and soon.

According to bus drivers of Local 241 of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) is showing them no respect. If some changes aren't made, the drivers are threatening a shutdown.

As in so many industries, the CTA had to take drastic action due to economic problems. They laid off over 1,000 workers and cut back on service to save money. They then had to change bus routes to work around those cuts. According to the drivers, additional and/or new bus routes had to be learned without accompanying raises or extra pay. They also claim that part-time drivers, who contractually cannot work over 32 hours in a week, have been forced to work 15- and 16-hour days in order to make up for the cuts in personnel.

The CTA suggested they might rollback some of the layoffs if the union members would take pay cuts or unpaid furlough days. The union said no; that enough is enough. The union says it plans to file a federal Fair Labor Standards Act lawsuit and a suit in Cook County Circuit Court. They claim that the CTA is showing disrespect for their contracts, agreements and various settlements. The CTA, on the other hand, says it has every right to take the actions it has.  Next steps may be to get an employment law attorney involved.

More than anything else, this sounds like a case of management mismanaging its relationship with its workers. A little respect goes a long way but, unfortunately, so does disrespect. As this situation unfolds, train workers of Local 308 of the ATU have been watching with interest.  They're in the same boat as the bus drivers, as it turns out… a boat showing signs of mutiny.

The number of labor lawsuits seems to be exploding across the country. It is hard to say if it's a symptom of the tough economic times or just a disturbing trend in companies trying to cheat employees out of wages. Labor suits become particularly tricky when they involve failure to pay for overtime. More often than not, they turn into cases of legal tug of war.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Labor sued the Sullivan University System in Kentucky and its president/CEO, Alva Sullivan, for allegedly violating the Fair Standards Labor Act. The lawsuit claims the university system failed to pay overtime to admissions officers and high school representatives of the system. The department alleges the system kept no records of the staff members wages or hours. The department is seeking two years in back wages as well as an equal amount in damages for 125 employees of Sullivan.

Working with the department's Wage and Hour Division in Atlanta, the Department of Labor has been investigating the payroll practices of Sullivan University since August 2007. Law requires employees to be paid the federal minimum wage for all hours worked, plus time-and-one-half of their regular pay rate for any amount of time over 40 hours a week, unless the employee qualifies as exempt. The labor laws also state that employers are required to keep accurate time and payroll records.

Attorneys for Sullivan, an institution comprised of three private colleges, dispute the allegations and note that the employees are exempt and not eligible to receive overtime. Furthermore, they claim that the admissions officers and high school representatives in question qualify as exempt employees because they make more than $24,000, the amount over which federal law requires employees be classified as exempt executives or professionals. Sullivan notes that in their current positions some of the employees make at least $30,000 per year and can in some cases make upwards of $70,000 annually.

Spokesmen for the university system have publicly denounced the charges and have made it known that Sullivan intends on fighting the Labor Department's claims.

Here is a trend in the United Kingdom we pray doesn’t catch on in the United States: According to the Guardian, the number of workers doing 10 or more hours of unpaid overtime a week has soared. In fact, the number of workers doing unpaid overtime is up by 14,000 throughout the UK. In an annual report conducted by the Trades Union Congress, or the TUC, nearly 900,000 employees logged in several hours of free work in 2009. The report, which monitors the work habits of the people of England, found that single women are more likely to work unpaid overtime than other employees by giving employers over seven hours of free labor a week.

Ladies like Delores Tacke from Montana don’t take kindly to the idea that women will gladly work for free. In fact, just last week the Montana Supreme Court upheld the decision of a Cascade County jury to grant Tacke back overtime pay. Tacke, a longtime employee of Energy West, was denied overtime pay by the company because she was classified as a supervisor who was salaried and therefore ineligible to receive overtime benefits. Any employee receiving a minimum of $455 per week and performing primarily managerial duties is usually exempt from overtime. The issue in Delores Tacke’s case was that her role at Energy West was fuzzy at best. Tacke did mainly non-managerial duties in her decades of unpaid overtime at the company, like answering phones, opening mail, and filing in for switchboard operators on breaks. These tasks do not easily fit in the supervisory profile. Tacke filed a suit for her unpaid overtime in September 2005. After a long battle, Delores Tacke, an employee of Energy West since 1970 and still an employee of the company today, was awarded $70,440 in uncompensated overtime wages as well as funds for her legal fees and expenses.

English ladies (and gentlemen) as well as American workers could all learn a thing or two about chutzpah from Delores Tacke. After all, working unpaid overtime is not only unfair and unhealthy, it is also illegal.

When it comes to misclassification of employees, the United States has now called in the big guns. President Obama, the attorney general and the IRS are all taking misclassification very, very seriously. Over 25 states have targeted employers who use this practice too by calling for tougher penalties for misclassifying workers.  A growing trend among financially strapped companies is to try and pass off regular employees as independent contractors.  Businesses misclassifying their regular workers as independent contractors avoid paying steep Social Security, unemployment, and Medicare taxes. This means these companies don’t withhold taxes from their employees either, causing “independent contractors” to not report 30 percent of their income. Companies like FedEx have been accused of misclassifying their employees as independent contractors by the Teamsters union for years. Naturally, misclassification means millions of dollars out of the government’s pockets and they are not taking this lying down.

Misclassification is also unfair and dangerous for regular, hardworking people.  Falsely classified independent contractors are stuck in a no-win situation. As independent contractors, they receive no paid sick days or holidays, no vacation or overtime, and usually no medical benefits. Moreover, misclassified workers are often forced to behave like regular employees with regular hours, and not allowed to work on their own schedule like most independent contractors do.  If injured while on the job, misclassified workers may not be protected. On a more hurtful level, those who are wrongly classified as independent contractors may not really be seen as valuable employees. By labeling workers as independent contractors when they do the work of normal employees, these people miss out on promotions, job recognition and raises while being expected to perform as everyone else does.

But the harms of misclassification don’t stop at independent contractors. There are many people around the country who do managerial work while only paid the salary of a regular employee, or teachers who are expected to teach several classes for different grades while only being paid to teach one grade. With the help of the President and the IRS as well as local government, perhaps misclassification will soon be taken seriously by employers trying to save a buck or two at their employees' expense.

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