Lawsuit Claims Harriman, Tenn. Utility Board Failed to Pay Proper Wages

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Harriman Utility Board faces a proposed collective action wherein a former employee claims he and other workers were not properly paid for every hour worked.

The 27-page case alleges the defendant, an electrical, water and natural gas utility, shaved time off of workers’ recorded hours, underpaid them for overtime hours, and automatically deducted time for meal breaks regardless of whether the employees actually took bona fide breaks.

The plaintiff, who worked in Harriman’s right-of-way department until May 2020, alleges the Roane County, Tennessee utility has failed to adhere to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by failing to properly pay employees for all hours worked.

According to the case, Harriman employed a “time-shaving” practice whereby it would round workers’ recorded hours to 15-minute intervals in its own favor. The lawsuit claims that although the utility’s timekeeping system recorded the exact minute each employee clocked in or out, the defendant always rounded the time to the nearest 15-minute interval after the worker clocked in or before the worker clocked out, not merely the nearest 15-minute interval.

“For instance, if an employee clocked in at 6:48 am, Defendant would calculate the number of hours worked from a ‘start time’ of 7:00 am, even though 6:45 am is a fifteen-minute increment of time and 6:48 am is closer in time to 6:45 am than it is to 7:00 am,” the complaint says.

Similarly, Harriman rounded employees’ clock-out times in the direction favorable to itself, the case says. According to the lawsuit, the defendant’s practice of shaving employees’ start and stop times in its favor resulted in significant unpaid wages for “a large and substantial amount of work performed.”

The case goes on to allege that Harriman has also unlawfully excluded certain compensation—such as safety bonuses, extra pay for time spent on “stand by,” or wages for time spent attending required community events—from workers’ regular rates for the purpose of calculating time-and-a-half overtime pay. The suit says the practice resulted in employees being underpaid for some of the weekly hours they worked in excess of 40.

Further, the lawsuit says Harriman automatically deducted time for meal breaks from workers’ wages regardless of whether they actually took a bona fide meal break. Moreover, after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, employees were not permitted to leave their work sites during lunch breaks, the suit says, meaning their lunches should have been treated as hours worked under federal law given they were not fully relieved of duties.

Finally, the lawsuit claims Harriman has failed to pay employees the promised amount of premium pay for non-overtime work in excess of eight or 16 hours in a day. According to the suit, the defendant’s aforementioned practices of shaving down workers’ time, not compensating time spent attending required events and automatically deducting time for meal breaks caused employees to be deprived of premium wages as promised in Harriman’s Employee Policy Manual. As stated in the complaint:

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