AT&T employees in California and across the country have filed a class-action lawsuit claiming the telecom giant did not pay their training specialists proper overtime wages.
The lawsuit, which was filed with a federal court in the Central District of California, claims that AT&T misclassified its training specialists under state and federal law as overtime-exempt employees.
The training specialists claim they work long hours, including nights and weekends, for which they are not properly compensated. The lawsuit asserts that this is in direct violation of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, as well as California law.
“My fellow Designers and Instructors and I work hard for AT&T and take pride in contributing to its success,” Wendell Walton, a plaintiff in the case said. “We just ask that we be paid fairly under the law.”
Law firms Outten & Golden and Posner & Rosen will represent the training specialists.
“This lawsuit seeks fair compensation for the many AT&T training specialists who have worked long hours to ensure the successful delivery of AT&T’s training programs,” Jahan C. Sagafi of Outten & Golden said.
The plaintiffs and their counsel have set up the website, www.attovertimepay.com, for AT&T training specialists around the country to join the class-action suit.
The complaint includes design and delivery instructors who interview and compile information from subject-matter experts and disseminated it to internal AT&T employees.
According to the website, it has been brought on behalf of all current and former training designers and instructors who have worked for AT&T in the past three years or in the past four years for those in California.
The title of the case is Walton v. AT&T Inc., Case No. 2:15-cv-03716 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division.
