Bjornson v. Daido Metal U.S.A., Inc.

• Decision Date: 28 July 1998
• Docket Number: No. 97 C 5976.,97 C 5976.
• Parties: William BJORNSON, Plaintiff, v. DAIDO METAL U.S.A., INC., Defendant.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Northern District of Illinois

12 F.Supp.2d 837

William BJORNSON, Plaintiff, v. DAIDO METAL U.S.A., INC., Defendant.

No. 97 C 5976.

United States District Court, N.D. Illinois, Eastern Division.

July 28, 1998.

Order Supplementing Opinion July 31, 1998.

Sandra G. Quello, Ernest T. Rossiello & Associates, P.C., Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff.

Nancy E. Sasamoto, Mitchell S. Chaban, Masuda, Funai, Eifert & Mitchell, Ltd., Chicago, IL, for Defendant.

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

SHADUR, Senior District Judge.

William Bjornson ("Bjornson") has filed suit against Daido Metal U.S.A., Inc. ("Daido") under the Fair Labor Standards Act ("Act"), 29 U.S.C. §§ 201-219,¹ and the Illinois Minimum Wage Law ("Illinois Act"), 820 ILCS 105/1 to 105/13, seeking damages for Daido's failure to pay him for hours of overtime labor that he assertedly performed for it.² Bjornson also requests preliminary and permanent injunctive relief under Act §§ 215(a)(3) and 216(b) to restrain Daido from retaliating against him for bringing this action.

Daido now moves for summary judgment under Fed.R.Civ.P. ("Rule") 56. Both sides have complied with this District Court's General Rule ("GR") 12(M) and 12(N),³ which has been adopted to highlight the existence or nonexistence of any material fact disputes, and Daido's motion is fully briefed and ready for decision. For the reasons set out in this memorandum opinion and order, Daido's motion is granted in its entirety.

Summary Judgment Standards

Familiar Rule 56 principles impose on Daido the burden of establishing the lack of a genuine issue of material fact (Celotex Corp. v. Catrett, 477 U.S. 317, 322-23, 106 S.Ct. 2548, 91 L.Ed.2d 265 (1986)). For that purpose this Court must "read[] the record in the light most favorable to the non-moving party," although it "is not required to draw unreasonable inferences from the evidence" (St. Louis N. Joint Venture v. P & L Enters., Inc., 116 F.3d 262, 265 n. 2 (7th Cir.1997)).

Facts

Bjornson began work for Daido on May 1, 1995 after a chance encounter led Daido's President Masanori Furuya ("Furuya") to offer him a job (D.12(M) ¶¶ 2-3). Daido assembles and sells bearings for shock absorbers and struts (id. ¶ 1). Bjornson was assigned to Daido's Morton Grove, Illinois office as a "liaison," with his primary duties involving the maintenance of Daido's files and the transfer of information between Daido and its primary client, Caterpillar (id. ¶ 5).

Bjornson was one of seven office employees at Daido's Morton Grove plant (id. ¶ 1). His supervisor was Daido's general manager Satoshi Yasuda ("Yasuda") until Yasuda left Daido in December 1996 (id. ¶ 13).

Bjornson's "Notice of Employment" laid out the terms of his employment and his standard work schedule. Bjornson's regularly scheduled workweek was Monday through Friday, with his workday beginning at 8:30 a.m. and running until 5:30 p.m. (id. ¶ 3). Daido paid Bjornson for a one-hour lunch but required that he stay in the office to work if needed during that time. Bjornson received one hour of overtime pay for his work from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. every day (id.).

When Bjornson began working at Daido he was responsible for keeping track of his regular and overtime hours in a payroll book (id. ¶ 6).⁴ Bjornson submitted his hours to Furuya for review at the end of each pay period (id.). Furuya checked Bjornson's entries, corrected any errors (including instances where Bjornson underestimated the money due him) and calculated Bjornson's accrued wages (id.). Furuya then returned the book to Bjornson, who confirmed his acceptance of Furuya's calculations by stamping his Hanko, or mark, in the book (id.).

Bjornson recorded one overtime hour in his payroll book virtually every workday, and he also claimed additional hours from time to time. From May 1995 through April 1996 Bjornson requested 8-½ hours of overtime in addition to the one hour per day that he took as a matter of course (D.Ex. 3). Similarly, from September 1996 to August 1997 Bjornson asked for 8 hours of overtime above and beyond his daily allotment (id.). During those periods Bjornson generally asked for only one extra hour at a time, and there were only three occasions when he asked to be paid for work after 7:30 p.m. (id.).

During the summer months of 1996, however, Bjornson was assigned the task of installing a new computer invoice system at Daido (D.12(M) ¶ 15). During the course of that project Bjornson requested between one to four hours of additional overtime (calculated in 15-minute increments) for virtually every day from May until mid-August (D.Ex. 3). For those four months Bjornson successively recorded 34.5, 40.5, 46 and 18.5 hours of additional overtime (id.).

Bjornson was compensated for every hour that he recorded in his payroll book between May 1995 and August 1997, a total of 694 hours of overtime (D.12(M) ¶ 10). Nonetheless, on August 22, 1997 Bjornson filed this suit against Daido alleging that he had not been paid for all of the overtime hours that he had worked for Daido.

Bjornson's Overtime Claim

Act § 207(a)(1) requires Daido to pay its employees overtime compensation of 1-½ times their normal wages for hours worked in excess of 40 hours per week. Bjornson does not dispute that Daido paid him at the correct rate for the overtime hours that he recorded in his payroll book and submitted to Furuya. Instead Bjornson asserts that Daido failed to pay him for additional overtime hours that he worked but never recorded in his payroll book or submitted to Daido's management.⁵

Bjornson points to Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680, 66 S.Ct. 1187, 90 L.Ed. 1515 (1946) for the analytical framework that should govern his claim. Mt. Clemens, id. at 687-88, 66 S.Ct. 1187 held that when an employer's compensation records are inaccurate or inadequate:

[W]e hold that an employee has carried out his burden if he proves that he has in fact performed work for which he was improperly compensated and if he produces sufficient evidence to show the amount and extent of that work as a matter of just and reasonable inference. The burden then shifts to the employer to come forward with evidence of the precise amount of work performed or with evidence to negative the reasonableness of the inference to be drawn from the employee's evidence. If the employer fails to produce such evidence, the court may then award damages to the employee, even though the result be only approximate.

But Bjornson's problem is that before the Mt. Clemens burden-shifting framework can come into play, he must first show that Daido's time records are either "inaccurate or inadequate" (id. at 687, 66 S.Ct. 1187).⁶ Bjornson does not argue that Daido's system of recordkeeping was inadequate in any way, and his contention that Daido's records are inaccurate is wholly dependent on his own deposition testimony. Bjornson estimated that for his first year at Daido (from May 1995 to April 1996) he usually stayed until 8:30 p.m. (Bjornson Dep. 108-09). Bjornson's hours then increased during the summer of 1996 because he had to install Daido's new computer invoicing system — and he testified that during the May-June time period he worked until 10 or 11 p.m. daily (id. at 90). Bjornson acknowledged that he worked fewer hours after that peak period, but he still estimated that after August 1996 he worked until 7:30 p.m. on average (id. at 109-10).

But Bjornson's payroll book, all the entries in which he himself made contemporaneously with his work performance each day, is totally at odds with his current claims. As already noted, Bjornson rarely claimed any time after 5:30 p.m. during most of his tenure at Daido. And even in the summer of 1996, when Bjornson did record longer hours because of a special project, he never claimed that he worked past 9:15 p.m. (D.Ex. 3).

Obviously aware of that contradiction, Bjornson seeks to attribute his failure to submit all of his overtime work to what he labels as Daido's corporate culture. According to Bjornson, Daido expected its employees to work as long as necessary to complete their assignments without asking questions or requesting more money (Bjornson Dep. 95). Bjornson said that he was reluctant to put in for more overtime than he did because he feared a "big hassle" if he did so (id. at 94). That story, unsupported even inferentially by anything in the record, was effectively acknowledged by Bjornson himself to be no more than subjective speculation (id. at 98-99).

But even more importantly, Bjornson's alleged reluctance to submit overtime claims is flatly belied by his own demonstrated willingness and ability to do exactly that. Bjornson submitted detailed and extensive requests for overtime (over and above the one hour that he claimed virtually every workday) throughout his entire tenure at Daido. Those consistently-presented and always-honored claims, which aggregated more than 34 hours of overtime pay (over and above the one-hour daily allotment) in each of the months from May to July 1996, and which totaled 694 hours of overtime from May 1995 to August 1997, directly negate Bjornson's newly-claimed diffidence.

As for the notion of some presumably hostile "corporate culture," Bjornson suffered no adverse job consequences as a result of his requests for overtime. Quite the reverse is true: Not only was he always paid for the time that he requested, but Furuya actually corrected Bjornson when he had mistakenly undercalculated the hours recorded in his book. Nor has Bjornson supplied any evidence of how or when Daido discouraged him (or anyone else) from asking for overtime. On the contrary, he admitted that he was never told that he had to perform uncompensated overtime at Daido (Bjornson Dep. 95).

Bjornson's attempted explanation that even though he put in daily requests he made them out for only a portion of his overtime is further contradicted by his actual pattern of overtime submissions. In those requests Bjornson recorded his time in...