The lawsuit seeks class action status, and attorneys for the two plaintiffs, Carolyn Ann Diacos and Darren Andrew Penquite, said the suit could impact as many as 60 current and former employees at the station.
The lawsuit details eight alleged violations, which range from failure to pay overtime wages and lack of meal periods and rest breaks, to a failure to provide accurate wage statements.
But a key element of the lawsuit accuses KEYT managers of directing employees to misrepresent hours worked in order to reduce overtime costs.
An example cited in the suit says employees were instructed to enter eight hours of work, and note a one-hour unpaid lunch break on their time sheets, regardless of whether they had taken a break.
And, according to Penquite, who was a newscast director at the station for nearly three years prior to quitting last May, if employees did note overtime on their time cards, they were threatened with their jobs.
“The bottom line is there was a lot of inappropriate behavior going on, not just in changing time cards but asking employees not to clock for hours on their timecards,” he said yesterday in a telephone interview.
The lawsuit, which was filed last Thursday by the law firm Anticouni & Associates LLP, says employees like Penquite and Diacos, a part-time producer at the station until earlier this month, were treated as though they were exempt from overtime pay, though they were technically classified as hourly employees, and were not participating in overtime-exempt work.
KEYT General Manager Mike Granados said by phone yesterday that the station’s attorneys were reviewing the suit. He declined to identify what law firm represented the station, which is owned by Smith Media, LLC.
“We believe there’s really no merit to the claims,” he said, noting that he had not yet reviewed the suit, but based his statement on the content of a newspaper story.
Along with failing to provide overtime compensation, the lawsuit outlines several other alleged violations, including: Failure to provide meal periods; failure to provide rest periods; failure to provide accurate itemized wage statements; failure to timely pay wages upon termination of employment; and failure to pay vested vacation wages.
The suit also alleges KEYT committed unfair business practices, a charge that apparently hinges on the length of time the violations occurred. According to the suit, the violations “were and are done repeatedly over a significant period of time and in a systematic manner.”
The 27-page suit goes on to call the alleged violations “immoral, unethical, oppressive, fraudulent and unscrupulous.”
Along with seeking a jury trial, the lawsuit estimates the amount of damages owed to each employee at less than $75,000, and pegs the total amount allegedly owed by the company at less than $5 million.
While some of the allegations, like falsifying timecards in order to buck overtime costs, would draw fire from nearly any employee, regardless of the line of work, lunch breaks and rest breaks in the media world often hinge on the ebb and flow of news.
An employee at another local television station, who asked to remain anonymous, said as much.
“[KEYT] is not the only station where those things happen,” the person said, noting that, “If things go wrong on a story, you may have to skip lunch to cover it.”
Yet, the source also said there’s a line between being an effective reporter, producer or director, and being asked to alter time cards and other documents to please management.
“Some of [the allegations] are clearly the result of cost cutting hitting the people on the bottom first,” the source said. “In the business you have to be more adaptable, but there is a limit to that adaptability.”
Penquite, who said he’s worked at various television and radio stations since he was 18, said he realizes lunch breaks are somewhat elastic in the news business. And for his part, Penquite said he’s more focused on overtime pay that he and other former and current employees deserve, but aren’t receiving.
“The bottom line,” he said, is “I just think that the behavior going on there needs to stop, period. I’m doing this in support of my friends and the people who I spent the last few years working with.”
Bruce N. Anticouni, one of two lawyers working the case, said it could be several months before a judge can determine if the suit deserves class action status.