Cases and Class Actions

The attorneys of the Law Offices of Thomas W. Falvey represent individuals who are not paid all of the wages they have earned. Because of the costs and risks of litigation, it rarely makes economic sense for a single worker to pursue a wage and hour lawsuit. As a result, large employers have traditionally flouted the nation’s wage and hour labor laws with impunity, often knowingly violating the law in the expectation that they can get away with it. Companies often flout our laws because:

1. Workers don't know what their rights are and assume they were paid correctly, and/or
2. Even when workers know they are being cheated, the company can get away with it because employees often will not sue to enforce their rights due to the risk workers face in suing the companies they work for, and/or
3. Even when sued, companies rely on the "frivolous lawsuit" excuse to try and convince juries they were not doing anything wrong, and that this is just another lawsuit brought by "greedy" plaintiffs and their attorneys who are unjustly suing "benevolent and innocent" companies
4. Employees may know their rights, but, because of the manner in which the paystubs are presented, the employees can’t tell that they’ve been cheated. Hours may not be broken down by the days, making it impossible to see what time was credited for work performed. Thus even in cases of blatant violations of the laws governing the workplace, even when the laws broken apply to all employers from large to small, employers using such tactics can get away with it, and/or
5. Employees are oftentimes not provided copies of their time cards, and no opportunity is provided to make copies of time submitted, allowing the employer to shave time off the clock; such lawbreaking results in earned wages, sometimes millions of dollars, being withheld from hundreds or thousands of employees and kept - illegally - by employers that know they are breaking the law when taking those wages from those employees.

However, we have been increasingly successful in prosecuting wage and hour claims as class action lawsuits. The class action vehicle allows hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands of similarly situated employees to sue an offending employer as part of a single overtime lawsuit. The advent of the wage and hour class action lawsuit has empowered workers to challenge illegal wage payment practices of their employers on a more level playing field. The class action device allows workers to sue companies that violate the law without taking the risks that individual litigation entails.