Memphis Jury Awards $3.87 Million to Nearly 300 Cable Technicians in FLSA Time-Shaving Case

For years, cable installation technicians working for FTS USA and its parent company Unitek USA were paid on a piece-rate basis and expected to complete jobs that regularly ran longer than their recorded shifts. The companies maintained a company-wide policy that, in practice, pressured workers to underreport overtime hours. Technicians were required to work off the clock before and after shifts, or to skip pay during unpaid lunch periods, while managers falsified timesheets to keep recorded hours artificially low. The scheme affected workers across multiple states.

Attorneys William B. Ryan and Bryce W. Ashby of Donati Law Firm, working alongside co-counsel from Nichols Kaster, filed suit in the Western District of Tennessee in February 2008 under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The case was certified as a collective action, ultimately drawing 293 opt-in plaintiffs who had worked as cable technicians installing services for major providers.

After years of litigation, the case went to trial in October 2011. The jury returned a verdict finding that FTS USA and Unitek USA had willfully violated the FLSA. In November 2012, the district court entered judgment of $3,873,045.48 for the collective, which did not include attorneys' fees and costs.

The defendants appealed, challenging the collective-action certification, the use of representative testimony from a subset of workers to establish damages for the entire group, and the damages calculation method. The Sixth Circuit, in a published opinion issued March 2, 2016 (Monroe v. FTS USA, LLC, 815 F.3d 1000), affirmed that the technicians were 'similarly situated' because they all worked under the same company-wide policy discouraging overtime reporting. The court upheld the use of estimated-average damages for non-testifying plaintiffs but remanded for recalculation of the damages figure using the correct 0.5 multiplier rather than the 1.5 multiplier the district court had applied to piece-rate overtime.

The Sixth Circuit opinion addressed a recurring question in FLSA collective actions: whether workers who experienced different forms of suppressed overtime reporting could still qualify as a single collective. The court held that a uniform policy discouraging overtime reporting across the enterprise was sufficient.