Petco Falsified Time Records for Groomers Class Action

It’s difficult enough for workers when wages are low. Unfortunately, the complaint for this class action alleges that Petco Animal Supplies, Inc. also falsified workers’ time records in order to avoid paying them proper overtime. The claims in this class action are brought under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and state labor laws.

The four plaintiffs for this class action—Cindy Gatto, Olivia Williams, Nicole Travis, and Shay Boyd—are all groomers, at different Petco stores around the country. Petco normally books the groomers for five eight-and-a-half hour shifts. The shifts supposedly include a half-hour lunch break.

The groomers clock in and out for the workday, and for each lunch period, via a computerized time-keeping system. However, the complaint alleges that Petco overrides the true times entered into the system by the workers and, on days when they were not able to take lunch breaks, adds in the missed lunch break. The complaint claims it also alters other hours at times.

The complaint points out that Petco is “a sophisticated employer with knowledge of its obligations under the FLSA” an understands “it is required to maintain accurate records of time worked” by its groomers and other employees.

Why does Petco knowingly alter employees’ time records? According to the complaint, it’s to avoid paying them overtime. The five shifts add up to a forty-hour week if lunch periods are taken; if lunch periods are skipped, the work at the end of the week will go into overtime, requiring the company to pay them time-and-a-half overtime pay. 

Although the four plaintiffs in this case work in stores in different parts of the country—Queens, NY, Titusville, FL, Coeur d’Alene, ID, and Quincy, IL—all of them have the same complaint. They have complained about the time alterations, “but management made no changes in response to these complaints.”

The complaint therefore makes an accusation: “Upon information and belief this common policy of altering (overriding) the time records and, in turn, paying less than the required overtime pay is part of a common corporate policy established and enforced centrally by Petco of trying to limit the paid work hours of the groomers to 40 hours and otherwise reduce the number of overtime hours paid to its groomers.”

The class or collective for this action has not been specifically defined, but it appears to be all persons in the US who were hourly non-exempt employees of Petco working as groomers who also had their timesheets altered and were therefore not properly paid for all the hours they worked, and who also did not receive overtime pay for the hours they worked over forty per week.

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Employment
Tags: Employment Violations, Fudging Time Sheets, Inaccurate calculation of breaks, Unpaid Overtime