Massachusetts: Court Forces Trash Co. to Dump Pay Scale
According to Forbes:
BOSTON - It's tough enough to toss tons of trash into the back of a garbage truck for 11 hours a day. But as Mike Mullally picked up water heaters, couches and buckets of nameless slop, he also was convinced he was getting ripped off by his company.
On Thursday, the state's highest court agreed.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Waste Management (nyse: WMI - news - people ) of Massachusetts broke the law by not calculating overtime pay using the state-mandated "prevailing wage." The court said Waste Management instead used a "payroll scheme" that based time-and-a-half overtime pay on a wage it calculated that was sometimes lower than that minimum wage.
The ruling could force the company to pay at least $6 million in compensation to about 500 drivers, not including penalties that could double or triple the total, said Attorney F. Henry Ellis, the lawyer in a class action suit in which Mullally was the lead plaintiff. The lawsuit was filed in May 2006.
Mullally, who now works for a different sanitation company, said when he heard about the ruling, "I pulled my truck over and I got out and yelled at the top of my lungs."...click to continue.
