George's Processing Inc. agreed this week to the settlement in a lawsuit brought by the Department of Labor, which sued the company for not paying workers for time spent donning and doffing work clothes and following sanitary procedures at the plant.
The money will be used to pay back wages to 5,482 current and former employees of George's Cassville, Mo. poultry- processing plant for uncompensated overtime hours.
George's Processing required the poultry workers are required to be ready to work, with work clothing and protective gear on, when the production lines starts running, but are not paid for the time spent putting on the gear or cleaning up at the end of the day. The judgment was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri as part of a programme by the Department of Labor to get poultry processors to follow the law.
The George's lawsuit was among a number filed since 2002 in the department's battle against a common poultry industry practice. The department contends that this "donning and doffing" time is work time that must be compensated.
"This significant settlement is the latest step in the department's initiative started several years ago to compel poultry processors to pay their workers for all hours worked," a press release stated.
It follows from the unanimous decision issued by the Supreme Court in November 2005 against a mining company, which vindicated the department's positions on "donning and doffing".
The department filed a similar suit against Tyson in May 2002. At the same time, Perdue Farms agreed to settle a lawsuit by changing its practices and paying back wages to 25,000 workers.
Similar lawsuits were filed by workers at a Pasco, Wash., slaughter and meat processing plant now owned by IBP Inc., a subsidiary of Tyson Foods and workers at a poultry processing plant in Portland, Maine.
In a court decision about 800 workers at the Washington beef slaughterhouse in the late 1990s were awarded $8.4 million in backpay from Tyson Foods, which inherited the lawsuit when it acquired the Iowa Beef Processors (IBP) slaughterhouse in Pasco in 2001.
The Labor Department stated that it is actively moving ahead to assure that other affected companies also pay their employees for all hours worked and comply with the requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act.