Wal-Mart Agrees to $54.3M Settlement of Minn. Wage-and-Hour Suit
The world’s biggest retailer has agreed to settle for $54.3 million a wage-and-hour suit brought in Minnesota on behalf of 100,000 or so workers there who say they were required to put in some work time off-the-clock over a 10-year period starting in 1998.
The settlement by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. follows a ruling in July by a state-court judge that the company had willfully violated state wage-and-hour laws by requiring employees at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club to work off-the-clock and denying them required breaks and owed $6.5 million in back pay, reports Bloomberg. A jury could have awarded as much as $2 billion in damages.
“The lawsuit is one of more than 70 cases, including class actions, or group, suits, in which Wal-Mart has been accused of wage-law violations,” the news agency writes. “The retailer lost a $78 million jury verdict in Pennsylvania in 2006 over rest breaks and unpaid work and a $172 million verdict in California in 2005 over meal breaks.”
Attorney Justin Perl of Maslon, Edelman, Borman and Brand in Minneapolis was one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs. Wal-Mart faced potential statutory penalties of $1,000 per violation (the judge found that there were 2 million violations) and punitive damages, he told LawyersandSettlements.com in July.
Wal-Mart also agreed to new electronic timekeeping systems, as part of the settlement, to ensure compliance with state wage-and-hour law.
