Moore v. Pender Ems & Fire, Inc.
| Decision Date | 02 December 2016 |
| Docket Number | NO. 7:16-CV-130-FL,7:16-CV-130-FL |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Eastern District of North Carolina |
| Parties | NATHAN MOORE and WINTER DURHAM, Plaintiffs, v. PENDER EMS AND FIRE, INC., Defendant. |
This matter is before the court on defendant's motion to dismiss, pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6). (DE 21). The motion has been fully briefed, and the issues presented are ripe for ruling. For the following reasons, defendant's motion is denied.
Plaintiffs filed this action on June 6, 2016, asserting claims under the Fair Labor Standards Act ("FLSA"), 29 U.S.C. § 201 et seq., arising from defendant's alleged failure to pay adequate overtime wages. Defendant moved to dismiss plaintiffs' claims on August 3, 2016, and plaintiffs filed an amended complaint. Defendant filed the instant motion on September 29, 2016, contending that conduct alleged in plaintiffs' amended complaint does not violate the FLSA.
The facts alleged in the amended complaint may be summarized as follows. Defendant is a non-profit corporation that provides emergency fire and medical services. Plaintiffs each worked for defendant as paramedics for approximately eight years. During their employment, plaintiffs' work schedules rotated on a periodic basis. Specifically, out of every seven weeks, plainitffs' work schedules required four weeks consisting of 48 hours of work and three weeks consisting of 72 hours of work.
For their efforts, plaintiffs were compensated according to a "fluctuating workweek" pay plan (the "fluctuating plan"), which purported to grant to plaintiffs a fixed weekly salary as compensation for the first 40 hours worked and, in addition, overtime pay calculated by adding to the fixed salary a product of three factors: (1) the quotient of the fixed salary divided by the number of hours actually worked, (2) the number of hours worked in excess of 40 hours, and (3) a coefficient of 1.5 to reflect an overtime premium. According to the fluctuating plan, if plaintiffs elected to work less than the scheduled 48 or 72 hours required in a given week, defendant was entitled to deduct the shortfall from plaintiffs' paid vacation or sick leave. Plaintiffs suggest that, during three weeks in which plaintiffs were directed to work less than 40 hours per week, defendant paid to plaintiffs a sum less than the fixed salary.
A motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim under Rule 12(b)(6) tests the legal sufficiency of the complaint but "does not resolve contests surrounding the facts, the merits of a claim, or the applicability of defenses." Republican Party v. Martin, 980 F.2d 943, 952 (4th Cir. 1992). A complaint states a claim if it contains "sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to 'state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.'" Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678 (2009) (quoting Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 570 (2007)). "Asking for plausible grounds . . . does not imposea probability requirement at the pleading stage; it simply calls for enough fact to raise a reasonable expectation that discovery will reveal [the] evidence" required to prove the claim. Twombly, 550 U.S. at 556. In evaluating the complaint, "[the] court accepts all well-pled facts as true and construes these facts in the light most favorable to the plaintiff," but does not consider "legal conclusions, elements of a cause of action, . . . bare assertions devoid of further factual enhancement[,] . . . unwarranted inferences, unreasonable conclusions, or arguments." Nemet Chevrolet, Ltd. v. Consumeraffairs.com, Inc., 591 F.3d 250, 255 (4th Cir. 2009).
Under the FLSA, employers may not employ covered workers "for a workweek longer than forty hours unless such employee receives" overtime compensation "at a rate not less than one and one-half times the regular rate at which [a worker] is employed." 29 U.S.C. § 207(a)(1). To satisfy this requirement, guidance promulgated by the Department of Labor ("DOL"), as recognized by the Fourth Circuit, permits employers to calculate overtime requirements through the fluctuating workweek method, subject to certain conditions. Griffin v. Wake Cty., 142 F.3d 712, 715 (4th Cir. 1998) (citing 29 C.F.R. § 778.114). Specifically, the requirements for a fluctuating workweek method of payment are:
(1) that the employee's hours must fluctuate from week to week, (2) the employee must receive a fixed weekly salary that remains the same regardless of the number of hours that the employee works during the week, (3) the fixed amount must be sufficient to provide compensation at a regular rate not less than the legal minimum wage, (4) the employer and the employee must have a clear, mutual understanding that the employer will pay the employee the fixed weekly salary regardless of the hours worked, and (5) the employee must receive a fifty percent overtime premium in addition to the fixed weekly salary for all hours that the employee works in excess of forty during that week.
Flood v. New Hanover Cty., 125 F.3d 249, 252 (4th Cir. 1997).
To satisfy the "fixed weekly salary" requirement, it is not necessary that an employee's paycheck be the same every week, but the salary, or non-overtime, portion of the overall compensation must remain the same every week. Id. Based on this rule, where plaintiffs allege that defendant did not pay the full fixed salary in three weeks plaintiffs worked fewer than 40 hours, plaintiffs have stated a claim that defendant did not meet the requirements for a fluctuating workweek pay plan. That is, since plaintiffs' pay was allegedly reduced when plaintiffs worked fewer than 40 hours, it cannot be said that plaintiffs "fixed weekly salary [] remain[ed] the same regardless of the number of hours that the employee[s] work[ed] during the week." Id. Therefore, plaintiffs adequately allege that defendant did not pay a "fixed salary" as required by (2)...
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