A pharmacist working for CVS Caremark Corp. filed a potential class action against the drugstore chain in a Pennsylvania federal court earlier this month. The plaintiff, Januis Baugh, claims the company regularly did not pay him and hundreds of other subordinate and floater pharmacists overtime wages in violation of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and state law Law360 (subscription required) recently reported. Baugh and other pharmacists in his position spent many hours “floating” from store to store to fill in for absent pharmacists and were not paid time-and-a-half for hours worked over 40 hours per week even though their paychecks evidenced they often worked 50 plus hours a week.
The FLSA requires that certain non-exempt employees receive time-and-a-half of their hourly rate for all hours worked over 40 hours per week. Baugh claims that he worked over 40 hours on at least ten separate occasions from October 2011 through October 2012 and was never paid time-and-a-half.
Baugh wants to represent a federal collective of subordinate and floater pharmacists who work or had worked at one of CVS’ over 400 Pennsylvania locations.
This is the most recent wage and hour violation claim by CVS’ pharmacists against their employer. A group of pharmacists sought to bring a class action against CVS in a California federal court also claiming wage and hour violations. In that case, the pharmacists sought to prove that they worked over 40 hours per week by using CVS’ computer program system Rx Connect, which is used to verify, look up and enter prescriptions. The California district judge refused to certify the class finding that the computer program could not support the pharmacists’ claims because employees often used co-workers log-ins and expert analysis found that the RX Connect evidence was not reliable because of false positives.
The attorneys in Sommers Schwartz’s Complex Litigation Group have been involved a variety of wage and overtime violations class action lawsuits. If you have questions regarding your rights as an employee, call us today.
