Tennessee Employment Lawyer Blog

In Tennessee and all across the United States, when employees work more than forty hours in one work week, they are entitled by law to overtime pay. However, many companies, businesses, and even rock stars find ways around this law or fail their employees overtime at all.

In this case, the former personal assistant for Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich is filing a lawsuit against the drummer for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act and failing to pay him overtime. Steven Wiig, Ulrich’s former personal assistant claims that Ulrich failed to pay him overtime when he worked between fifty and seventy hours a week. Wiig also claims that his job duties included maintaining Ulrich’s music and movie collections, hosting guests at concerts, driving the drummer to late night social events, videotaping personal and professional appearances, and dealing with issues related to Ulrich’s art collection. The lawsuit states that Wiig performed these tasks while at Ulrich’s home, studio, and on worldwide tours.

Ulrich may argue that Steven Wiig was exempt from overtime pay because of the domestic service exemption which makes household employees such as cooks, waiters, butlers, caretakers, and chauffeurs of vehicles for family use exempt from overtime pay requirements. However, courts have stated that in order to qualify for this exemption the job duties must be solely domestic and not include such work as answering phones or taking messages.

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Police K-9 Office Bob Diorio filed a an FLSA lawsuit against the Village of a local park so that he could collect money for the time he has spent taking care of the department’s service animal, Thor. According to the lawsuit, Diorio is seeking compensation for the two to three years worth of time he claims he has spent with Thor outside of his regular work hours, which should be time and half an hourly rate.

The lawsuit states that Diorio, “spends an excessive amount of time outside his regular working hours caring for, feeding, grooming and transporting his service animal.”
Finally, according to the lawsuit, Diorio's annual salary totals $83,096, along with an added $2,000 stipend for being the K-9 officer. He earns $39.95 per hour, Village Manager Scott Niehaus stated, and was reimbursed $1,472 last fiscal year for food and supplies he bought for the pooch. Village Manager Scott Niehaus also stated that, “the village has not been formally served with the lawsuit and no internal grievances were previously filed by Diorio on the topic of overtime pay”

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According to this lawsuit, two men who worked on the movie “Black Swan” are challenging the industry’s accepted unpaid internship policy by claiming that Fox Searchlight Pictures, the production company for the movie, had their interns do basic work that should have been done by paid employees and they also claim that the company did not provide them with any type of educational experience that labor rules require in order to exempt employers from paying their interns.

The lawsuit also states that, “In misclassifying many of its workers as unpaid interns, Fox Searchlight has denied them the benefits that the law affords to employees.” One of the plaintiffs’s Alex Footman, worked on “Black Swain” from October 2009 until February 2010 and claims his responsibilities included preparing coffee for the office, making sure the coffee pot was full, taking and handing out lunch orders to the production staff, cleaning the office and taking out the trash. The other plaintiff, Eric Glatt, claimed he prepared documents for purchase orders and petty cash, traveled to the set to get signatures on documents, and created spreadsheets to track missing information in an employee’s file.

The lawsuit is seeking class action for what the plaintiffs claim were more than one hundred unpaid interns on various Fox Searchlight Productions. The lawsuit is also seeking back pay under federal and state minimum wage laws and seeking an injunction barring Fox Searchlight from improperly using unpaid interns. Russell Nelson, a Fox Searchlight spokesman, said, “We just learned of this litigation and have not had a chance to review it so we cannot make any comment at this time.”

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