Lawsuit Claims Former Wanderers Club Employees Owed Unpaid Overtime Pay

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Two plaintiffs claim the operators of Wellington, Florida’s Wanderers Club have refused to pay workers proper overtime wages after misapplying what the golf and country club claimed was an exemption to certain Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) regulations.

According to the 18-page complaint, defendants Wanderers Club Partners, LLC and Wanderers Club Holdings, LLC paid its staff of approximately 200 workers proper time-and-a-half overtime wages until December 2017, when the club allegedly claimed to be covered under the FLSA’s “seasonal amusement and recreational exemption.” The case explains that this provision of the federal labor law exempts from overtime pay requirements any “amusement or recreational establishment, organized camp, or religious or non-profit educational conference” as long as the entity operates for no more than seven months per year or if its average receipts for any six months of a year are not more than one-third (33 and 1/3 percent) of its average receipts for the other six months.

The plaintiffs allege that the Wanderers Club meets neither of the exemption’s requirements. Not only is the club open 12 months per year, the case says, but there has been no calendar year since 2016 for which the defendants’ average receipts for six months did not exceed one-third of their average receipts for the other six months. Moreover, the lawsuit claims the defendants are well aware that the Wanderers Club does not meet the “seasonal amusement and recreational exemption” given the entities are required to analyze their cash receipts from each previous year to determine whether they qualify for the exemption.

The case claims the defendants “thus knew or showed reckless disregard” for the FLSA in denying employees proper time-and-a-half overtime wages.

According to the plaintiffs, the defendants in December 2017 required all otherwise non-exempt employees to sign a disclosure in which they “falsely and wrongfully” acknowledged that they would no longer receive overtime pay due to the aforementioned FLSA exemption. All new employees hired since then have been required to sign the same disclosure form as a condition of their employment, the case says.

The two plaintiffs—a former locker room attendant and guest services manager and a former bartender and banquet server—claim they are respectively owed $15,000 and $20,000 in unpaid overtime wages.