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Peter Tragos is a Florida based attorney who specializes in criminal, personal injury, and medical malpractice.
An amended complaint has been filed against MetLife, Inc., as well as two its subsidiaries, MetLife Insurance Company USA and Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
The $50 million lawsuit was filed against the country’s largest insurance company on behalf of two long-term disability (LTD) claims specialists who worked for the company and alleges that MetLife has failed to pay the two women, along with other LTD claim specialists, the overtime pay they deserve.
According to the lawsuit, the two women were working between 45 to 60 hours each week and the owed overtime compensation began building up in November 2013 when the company misclassified them as “exempt” salaried employees.
Federal law requires that any employee who works more than 40 hours per week must be compensated time-and-a-half for those extra hours. The law does permit companies to exclude employees from that law if they meet certain criteria.
The women originally filed two separate lawsuits against the MetLife. One of the women, who worked in Connecticut, filed her complaint on February 7, 2017 as a nationwide collective action under the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act, as well as a class action of Connecticut employees.
In her original complaint, the plaintiff – who is no longer employed at the company – said claim specialists often had to collect claims information after hours and she was often forced to work from her home at night and on weekends.
The second plaintiff, who works in New York, filed her complaint as an overtime class action under New York law on behalf of a class of New York employees on February 8, 2017.
The new lawsuit consolidates the complaints of both women into one. According to one of the attorneys handling the lawsuit, combining both complaints offers significant litigation efficiencies which will benefit not only both the plaintiffs in the case, but also the classes of employees they are also seeking to represent.
The attorneys say that the MetLife’s misclassification of employees as exempt applied to employees in states across the country, including Connecticut, Illinois, and New York. The lawsuit seeks relief for both present and past employees of MetLife.
MetLife recently agreed to pay $32.5 million to more than 600 financial service representatives, both past and present employees, in a racial discrimination lawsuit. The lawsuit accused MetLife of offering less valuable accounts to the plaintiffs and awarding few promotions.
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