Minnesota employers of drivers take note – the Minnesota District Court in Farah v. Alpha & Omega USA, Inc. dba Travelon Transportation held that drivers’ trip logs provide constructive notice of unpaid overtime. The employer, a transportation service company for elderly and disabled individuals, employed Plaintiffs under an independent contractor agreement as drivers. As a part of their job, the drivers were required to track, for each individual trip, the mileage traveled, the customer’s name, the addresses of each customer’s pick up and drop off location, as well as when the driver began and ended driving.

The drivers brought a lawsuit claiming the company misclassified them as independent contractors, and as a result denied them minimum wage and overtime in violation of the FLSA. The court dismissed the company’s claim that it was unaware the drivers were working overtime hours because the pay system was based on number of jobs, not on hours worked. The Court found the trip logs provided the company with constructive notice the drivers were working overtime because “the trip logs were the very records used to document the work Plaintiffs performed and which formed the basis for their compensation.”

A couple of takeaways here. First, recall that employers may require all employees – even salaried employees – to record their time.  In the event of a claim of misclassification, the parties can avoid usually the most costly part of the dispute – how many hours the employee allegedly worked (unless they allege off-the-clock work, of course).  Second, the employer can avoid a recordkeeping violation that almost always accompanies a misclassification claim because the salaried employee didn’t record hours worked (as required of an hourly employee). And finally, this goes to hourly (properly classified) workers – if there is a log of time driven (or worked) as here, it should be cross referenced against a time card so as to avoid an “off the clock” argument.  Nothing new here, just a reminder.