Smith v. Continental Oil Co.
Decision Date | 30 January 1945 |
Docket Number | Civil Action No. 3863. |
Citation | 59 F. Supp. 91 |
Parties | SMITH v. CONTINENTAL OIL CO. |
Court | U.S. District Court — Eastern District of New York |
Philip G. Fitz, of New York City, for plaintiff.
Richard S. Holmes, of New York City, for defendant.
Plaintiff brings this action to recover unpaid overtime compensation for work alleged to have been performed between October 24, 1938 (the effective date of the Act), and May 31, 1941 (the time when his employment ceased), an additional equal amount as liquidated damages, and attorney's fees, pursuant to Section 16(b) of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, Pub. Law 718, 75th Cong., 52 Stat. 1060, 29 U.S.C.A. § 201 et seq. § 216(b). The answer of the defendant asserts among other defenses that:
This case well illustrates the savings of time and labor which pre-trial authorized by Rule 16 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 28 U.S.C.A. following section 723c, makes possible. All the material facts were embodied in a stipulation entered into at the pretrial conference, of which the relevant parts are as follows:
The only matter left for decision is the legal question of whether the action is barred by the Statute of Limitations.
The Fair Labor Standards Act does not itself specify any time within which the right of action it confers must be commenced, though jurisdiction is provided in both federal and state courts. This omission might well be remedied by the Congress in the interest of uniformity.1 As it now stands, the Statute of Limitations of the state in which the cause of action arose will be applied. McClaine v. Rankin, 197 U.S. 154, 25 S.Ct. 410, 49 L.Ed. 702, 3 Ann.Cas. 500; Cunningham v. Weyerhauser Timber Co., D.C.1943, 52 F.Supp. 654; Reliance Storage & Inspection Co., Inc. v. Hubbard, D. C., 1943, 50 F.Supp. 1012.
A cause of action under the Act accrues to an employee when the employer becomes liable for payment of that which the Act requires; he is thus liable at the end of each regular pay period. Since plaintiff's compensation was at a monthly rate and he was paid on the 26th day of each month, it was upon this day each month that a cause of action accrued to him for the salary due for the month just passed, together with any unpaid overtime compensation and liquidated damages he became entitled to under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It did not, as plaintiff suggests, hang in abeyance until the employment ended or until the employee made demand for overtime pay. Klotz v. Ippolito, D.C., 1941, 40 F.Supp. 422; Divine v. Levy, D. C., 1942, 45 F.Supp. 49; Reliance Storage & Inspection Co., Inc., v. Hubbard, supra; see also Taylor v. Tulsa Tribune Co., 10 Cir., 1943, 136 F.2d 981.
Since all the work for the compensation of which the defendant became liable each month was performed in Oklahoma, the causes of action accrued there. The applicable Oklahoma Statute of Limitations appears in Title 12, Section 95 Second Subdivision of the Oklahoma Statutes Annotated, which reads as follows:
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