Dive Brief:

• RaceTrac is facing a class-action lawsuit claiming the convenience retailer failed to pay hourly employees all of their overtime wages in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), according to court documents filed with the U.S. District Court Middle District of Tennessee.
• The suit claims that RaceTrac has regularly failed to fully record a number of employees’ overtime hours into its timekeeping system, and also accuses the retailer of “editing” some overtime hours out of the system.
• The lawsuit alleges that RaceTrac withheld this pay to save payroll costs and payroll taxes, and that the company “enjoyed ill-gained profits” at its employees’ expenses.

Dive Insight:

The plaintiff — a full-time, hourly RaceTrac employee — claims that she was regularly scheduled to work 45 hours per week and often worked “far in excess” of that amount, according to the documents. Still, RaceTrac only compensated her for 45 hours of work, the documents noted.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the FLSA requires that covered, nonexempt employees receive overtime pay for hours worked over 40 per work week at a rate no less than one-and-one-half times the regular rate of pay.

The lawsuit claims that RaceTrac’s failure to pay the plaintiff and others one-and-one-half times their regular hourly rates for overtime shifts was “willful and with reckless disregard to established FLSA overtime compensation requirements, and without a good faith basis for such failure.”

While no numerical amount was disclosed, the plaintiff is seeking an award of compensation for unpaid overtime, according to the documents.

Because it’s a class-action case, any individual who worked for RaceTrac as an hourly employee over the past three years can be represented in this lawsuit, the documents note.

A spokesperson from RaceTrac did not respond by press time to a request to comment on the lawsuit.

Founded in 1934, Atlanta-based RaceTrac owns and operates 566 convenience stores in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Tennessee. When including its c-store subsidiary RaceWay, the retailer also operates over 200 additional locations in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas.