Wage and hour lawsuits against employers are making headlines. Staffing firms, which can face special issues, are frequently in the crosshairs.

Apple Computer Inc. and its staffing firm were sued this month alleging workers weren’t paid for all hours worked. Google and its staffing provider were also sued. Integrity Staffing prevailed this month at the Supreme Court level when contingent workers sued it over time spent waiting in security lines.

A report released earlier this year by the United States Government Accountability Office found the number of Fair Labor Standards Act lawsuits (filed against all firms not just staffing companies) rose by more than 500 percent from 1991 through 2012.

“Wage and hour law is a very fruitful area for litigation,” said George Reardon, an attorney who works with the staffing industry. “There’s a lot of it; much of it is poorly defined, making even good faith compliance difficult; many employers consider its intrusion into their business affairs to be unreasonable; and it is widely violated, creating a moral hazard in the competitive labor marketplace. Amazingly, some employers who minimize all of their other business risks ignore huge wage and hour risks.”

There are very many specific issues in wage and hour law, Reardon said. However, staffing relationships add other complications. Here are some issues Reardon points to that are specific to staffing firms: 

• “Customers sometimes insist staffing firms treat assigned employees as exempt because the customer treats its own similar employees as exempt. But the customer may be doing it wrong; exemption may not apply the same way to an assigned employee; and the staffing firm makes its living selling time, not giving away overtime.”
• “Many customers operate modern electronic timekeeping systems and want assigned employees to use them. While these are convenient, they may end-run the traditional step where the assigned worker agrees to the recorded work time. This has led to class actions where customers’ front-line supervisors, under financial pressure, underreported time worked by temporary employees.”
• “Customers’ timekeeping systems may subject the assigned employees’ wages to the rounding rules used by the customer’s timekeeping system, which may be improper. Also, the placement of the customer’s time clock can cause legally compensable preliminary or postliminary activites to be excluded from time worked.”
• “Pay for interview time has been an issue in California, but this exposure could also be raised under the federal law and the laws of some other states.”
• “Meal and rest periods are a special staffing problem because the staffing firm employer is not in control of the work schedules of its assigned employees.”
• “The use of independent contractors invokes wage and hour law because both the staffing firms and the customers that use them are vulnerable when authorities conclude that contractors should have been treated as employees.”