Lawsuit Claims Tyson Foods Owes Supervisors Unpaid Overtime Wages

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A former Tyson Foods, Inc. production supervisor claims in a lawsuit that he was misclassified as exempt from overtime pay despite being required to perform essentially the same duties as non-exempt employees.

The plaintiff says he worked at the defendant’s Fort Worth, Texas meat processing and packing plant for approximately 30 years. According to the proposed collective action, the man was paid on a salary basis without time-and-a-half overtime even though he spent roughly 90 percent of his work time on the production line performing the same tasks as hourly paid employees.

“Even though Plaintiff should have been paid an hourly rate as a non-exempt employee pursuant to his job duties, and received overtime premium pay when he worked in excess of forty hours in a workweek, Defendant at all times paid Plaintiff on a salary basis,” the complaint states. “As a result, Plaintiff did not receive all overtime pay to which he was entitled.”

The plaintiff claims that despite his job title, he was granted no managerial duties, including the authority to hire and fire employees and the ability to exercise independent judgment with respect to significant business matters. Instead, the plaintiff was primarily tasked with manual labor duties and “occasionally provided guidance and encouragement” to those he was purportedly supervising, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit claims Tyson’s failure to pay overtime wages to production supervisors is a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

The suit looks to cover all current and former employees of Tyson Foods who, within the past three years, worked as salaried supervisors and were denied overtime wages due to their misclassification as exempt employees under the FLSA.

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