TCF Accused of Wage Theft

Here's another example of wage theft by a company that declares employees "exempt" because they're supposedly managers, when they really are just front-line workers who should get paid overtime if they work more than 40 hours:


As I've said in the past, this is a favorite way for chain stores, fast food restaurants, and now, I guess, banks like our locally based TCF to short their workers on the pay they're entitled to.

These workers are assistant managers, but they

often worked 45 to 50 hours a week, performing the same tasks as nonexempt hourly employees, but were not given overtime pay because they are considered management.

At the heart of the lawsuit is the Fair Labor Standards Act, which divides occupations into those that are eligible for compensation when working more than 40 hours a week, and those in the executive and professional class who are not.

“Typically, assistant branch managers do some managerial duties, but that doesn’t do the trick under [the FLSA]. It has to be your ­primary duty,” said Justin Swartz, partner at Outten & Golden, a New York law firm that co-filed the ­lawsuit. “And their primary duty at branches across the U.S. is customer service, teller work and sales, and those are the same things that they hire hourly people to do who get overtime.”

TCF is a bank that used to seem community-oriented, but has over the last few decades become the corporate standard-bearer for the free-market-at-all-costs way of doing business. Its longtime CEO, Bill Cooper is pretty much an inverted image of Pope Francis.