In September of 2015, two delivery drivers filed a class action lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. The employees alleged that their former employer violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by failing to pay them overtime between 2012 and 2015. The class subsequently ballooned to 474 members (and an additional 588 former and current delivery drivers remain eligible to opt into the class). The members asserted that over that three year period, the employer denied them overtime for five to ten hours per workweek, totaling over $10 million in allegedly unpaid wages.

The employer initially argued that the employees were exempt from overtime requirements. It claimed that in addition to making deliveries, as “Route Sales Professionals,” the drivers could make additional sales, fill orders, and upsell when making deliveries. Therefore, according to the employer, the drivers fell within the FLSA’s “outside sales person” exemption. The drivers maintained that sales were not part of their job duties; they were simply delivery drivers who did not fit within the outside sales exemption.

After two years of discovery, in April of this year, the parties notified the court that they had reached a settlement agreement. They asked the court to approve agreement, as is required with both FLSA claims and class actions lawsuits.

The amount: $2.5 million.

This month, the court approved the FLSA settlement. It also preliminarily granted approval of the class action settlement, subject only to a fairness hearing scheduled for September.

For our blog subscribers that have delivery drivers who also engage in incidental sales, now is the time to reevaluate how you classify those employees. In addition, this case serves as an important reminder for all employers that FLSA classifications turn on the actual job duties of the position, not the job title. In fact, a written job description will not even be controlling, unless it is an accurate reflection of the employee’s job duties.