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November 6, 2023
In Herrera v. Comme Des Garcons, Ltd.,[1] the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit addressed the following question: to state a claim for unpaid overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act, what level of specificity must a complaint allege with respect to the number of hours an employee worked?
The answer: not that much.
In Herrera, the plaintiffs sued luxury fashion brand Comme Des Garcons and related defendants alleging that, during their employment, defendants had misclassified them as exempt employees under the FLSA and its New York state counterpart, and that they did not receive the overtime payments to which they were statutorily entitled. The District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the FLSA claim and declined to exercise jurisdiction over the state claim, concluding that the plaintiffs had failed to plead their FLSA claim with the specificity required under prevailing Second Circuit precedent. The plaintiffs appealed, and the Second Circuit reversed.
The FLSA requires covered employers to compensate employees for hours worked in excess of 40 hours in a workweek at a rate of not less than one and one-half times the employee’s regular rate.[2] An employee is exempt from this requirement if, among other exemptions, they work in a “bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity.”[3] Employees who are entitled to, but denied, overtime, or who are misclassified as exempt from the overtime requirements, may sue to recover unpaid overtime and liquidated damages.[4] In this case, all of the plaintiffs had “manager” in their job title, but contended that their actual job duties were non-managerial. The Second Circuit agreed.
The Second Circuit also agreed with the plaintiffs that the District Court had held them to too high of a pleading standard, demanding a level of detail and specificity that exceeded the FLSA’s requirements. The Court held that where the “[p]laintiffs plausibly allege that they worked more than forty hours per week as part of their regularly scheduled workweek, they have adequately stated a claim under the FLSA and need not list the specific workweeks during which they worked more than forty hours.”[5] The Court also confirmed that FLSA plaintiffs are not required “to keep careful records and plead their hours with mathematical precision.”[6]
The Second Circuit took pains to reaffirm its holdings in three earlier decisions (Nakahata, Dejesus, and Lundy)[7] where it found that the plaintiffs had failed to satisfy the requisite FLSA pleading standards while, at the same time, explaining why it reached a different result in Herrera. The Court commented that it has consistently required “some degree” of “specificity” to adequately plead an FLSA claim.[8] However, the plaintiffs in Nakahata, Dejesus, and Lundy failed to meet that standard because they provided insufficiently detailed allegations, i.e., that at “some undefined period in their employment, they worked more than 40 hours in a single week.”[9] The Herrera plaintiffs, on the other hand, had met and exceeded the Court’s requirements because they alleged that they were hired to work, and did work, more than forty hours per week as part of their regularly scheduled workweek. As such, “they were eligible for overtime during every week in which they worked their regular schedule.”[10] This distinction, according to the Court, was the critical one.
The takeaway for New York employers is twofold: (1) simply putting the word “manager” in an employee’s title does not automatically confer exempt status upon them; and (2) an employee need not maintain detailed records of hours worked or plead those hours with “mathematical precision.” Rather, plaintiffs can satisfy the pleading requirements of the FLSA by sufficiently alleging “40 hours of work in a given workweek as well as some uncompensated time in excess of the 40 hours. Nothing more is required.”[11]
This newsletter is designed to provide one perspective regarding recent legal developments, and is not intended to serve as legal advice, nor does it establish an attorney-client relationship with any reader of the article where one does not exist. Always consult an attorney with specific legal issues.
[1] No. 22-1962-cv, 2023 U.S. App. LEXIS 27385 (2d Cir. Oct. 16, 2023).
[2] 29 U.S.C. § 207(a)(1).
[3] Id. at §213 (a)(1).
[4] Id. at § 216(b).
[5] Herrera, 2023 U.S. App. LEXIS at *3.
[6] Id. at *15, citing Dejesus v. HF Mgmt. Servs., LLC, 726 F.3d 85, 90 (2d Cir. 2013).
[7] See Nakahata v. New York-Presbyterian Healthcare Sys., Inc., 723 F.3d 192 (2d Cir. 2013), Dejesus, 726 F.3d at 85, and Lundy v. Cath. Health Sys. Of Long Island Inc., 711 F.3d 106 (2d Cir. 2013).
[8] Herrera, 2023 U.S. App. LEXIS at *8.
[9] Id. at *15 (emphasis in original).
[10] Id. (emphasis in original).
[11] Id. at *10, citing Lundy, 711 F.3d at 114, and Dejesus, 726 F.3d at 88.
