Preview:

Supreme Court, Albany County, June 11, 2007
APPEARANCES OF COUNSEL
Outten & Golden, LLP, New York City (Adam T. Klein, Tarik F. Ajari, Justin M. Swartz and Carmelyn O. Malalis of counsel), Lieff, Cabraser, Heinmann & Bernstein, LLP, New York City (Jonathan D. Selbin, Rachel Geman and Nicholas R. Diamond of counsel), and Gleason, Dunn, Walsh & O'Shea, Albany (Ronald J. Dunn of counsel), for plaintiffs. Greenberg Traurig, LLP (Henry M. Greenberg, Albany, and Donald R. Frederico, Boston, Massachusetts, of counsel), for defendant. National Employment Law Project, New York City (Catherine K. Ruckelshaus of counsel), for Working Families Party, amicus curiae.
OPINION OF THE COURT
Richard M. Platkin, J.
This is a motion brought pursuant to CPLR 901 for certification of this matter as a class action and recognition of the named plaintiffs as class representatives. The action seeks relief based on alleged violations of the Labor Law committed by defendant against hourly workers at the 92 Wal-
Mart and Sam's Club stores located in New York State.[FN1] This lawsuit mirrors dozens of actions commenced in recent years in sister states against this same defendant. All of these actions involve allegations of similar misconduct.
According to plaintiffs' second amended complaint, as amplified by their submissions filed in support of the present motion, defendant systematically deprived hourly workers (known as associates) of wages through a variety of unlawful practices. Plaintiffs contend that defendant routinely understaffed its stores and, in order to make up for this deliberate shortage of workers, required associates to work through their earned rest breaks and lunch periods in order to complete assigned tasks. Additionally, associates were said to have been required to work without compensation "off the clock" either before their shifts began or after their shifts had ended.
Plaintiffs further contend that, as an additional illegal cost-cutting measure, defendant's management personnel routinely falsified associates' computerized time records. If an associate, for example, failed for any reason to "swipe out"[FN2] at the end of a shift, a manager would [*2]electronically insert a fictitious entry that would reflect on the company's payroll records that the associate had "swiped out" one minute after the shift had begun, thereby depriving the associate of earnings for that shift. Another alleged practice involved the posting of overtime hours onto a subsequent week's payroll as regular earnings in order to deprive the associate of the time-and-one

Download 2007_27250.pdf

New York Law