Lawsuit Claims Sloan Valve Company Underpaid Hourly Factory Workers

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A proposed class and collective action alleges Sloan Valve Company has underpaid workers by failing to record every hour worked and excluding nondiscretionary bonuses when calculating overtime rates.

The suit out of Arkansas’s Eastern District Court alleges Sloan, a manufacturer of commercial plumbing systems, was aware of its obligations under state and federal laws to properly pay employees yet willfully refused to do so.

“Defendant knew or showed reckless disregard for whether the way they paid Plaintiff and other hourly-paid employees violated the [Fair Labor Standards Act] and [Arkansas Minimum Wage Act],” the complaint claims.

The plaintiff, a White County, Arkansas resident, says he was employed as an hourly paid worker at the defendant’s Augusta manufacturing facility, where he and other workers regularly put in more than 40 hours per week. Per the case, the employees recorded their hours via an electronic timekeeping system. 

According to the suit, however, the defendant’s payroll system routinely rounded down the hours worked by employees in favor of the company.

“For example,” the complaint states, “if an hourly-paid employee clocked out at 5:11 p.m., the payroll system recorded his or her end time as 5:00 p.m. Likewise, if an hourly-paid employee clocked in at 7:51 a.m., Defendant’s payroll system recorded his or her start time as 8:00 a.m.”

This rounding practice, the lawsuit alleges, resulted in employees accruing several hours of unpaid work per month.

The case goes on to claim that workers were also paid nondiscretionary bonuses “on a regular basis” when they met certain “objective and measurable criteria.” When calculating employees’ bonuses, however, Sloan failed to include the supposedly unpaid hours that were rounded out by the payroll system, the lawsuit alleges.

Moreover, Sloan failed to include nondiscretionary bonuses as part of workers’ regular pay rates when calculating their time-and-a-half overtime rates, the suit attests.

“Section 778.208 of Title 29 of the Code of Federal Regulations requires that nondiscretionary bonuses, such as production or attendance based incentives, ‘must be totaled in with other earnings to determine the regular rate on which overtime pay must be based,’” the complaint relays.

The lawsuit claims Sloan’s allegedly unlawful pay practices were part of a “centralized human resources policy” that similarly affected all hourly workers at the company’s Augusta facility.

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