Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives

For decades, most federal courts have held the view that private settlements of Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) claims are unenforceable unless they are approved by the Department of Labor or a court.  However, as we have reported in prior posts, some federal courts have recently begun to challenge this long-held view and have taken a more flexible approach that treats FLSA settlements no differently than settlements or releases involving other employment law claims.  In the recent decision of Stuntz v. Lion Elastomers, L.L.C., the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals continued that trend and held that a union’s private settlement of FLSA claims on behalf of bargaining unit employees precludes individual bargaining unit employees from later bringing their own FLSA claims.

Under Section 203(o) of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”), an employee’s time spent “changing clothes” at the beginning or end of each workday is not compensable if such time is expressly excluded from compensable work time in a bona fide collective bargaining agreement or if there is a “custom or practice” of non-payment for such activities (or payment for a set amount of time).  On Monday, the Supreme Court clarified the definition of “changing clothes” for purposes of the FLSA, holding that a class of 800 unionized steelworkers, whose employment was covered by a collective bargaining agreement, were not entitled to compensation for time spent changing into and out of protective gear.