Wage and hour survey is admitted in FLSA case

John Johnson and Robert Burden v. Big Lots Stores, Inc., United States
District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana

In this case, the plaintiff's allege that the assistant store managers
are missclassifed as exempt from OT. According the plaintiff's report they
assistant managers worked on average 58 hours a week but were paid for
only 40 hours.

Plaintif's hired an ecoonomist to perform a survey of the opt-in members
of the class. The plaintiff's damage analysis was based on the survey.

Summary:

In a nutshell the defense argues that the plaintiff's survey is flawed. Argue to the brief, the flaws are as follow. First, the respondents are interested in the outcome of the litigation for
which the survey was conducted, and were told that the survey was to be used to help with their case, rendering the results unreliable. Second, additional methodological defects infected the survey with bias, rendering the analysis based upon it unreliable. Finally, the plaintiff's expert asked the wrong questions, resulting in misleading and unreliable answers.

The court disagreed and denied the defense's Daubert motion. In the coming post, we will discuss this case in more detail.

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