Wage and Hour Division (WHD)

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NEW YORK -- MSC Painting Corp., Scarsdale, N.Y., and President Charles W. McGuire Jr., have paid a total of $120,000 in back wages and liquidated damages ordered by a federal judge earlier this year. The payment was compelled through garnishment after the company failed to pay installments to settle a U.S. Labor Department lawsuit alleging violations of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

An investigation by the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division had found that employees of MSC Painting, which does business as MSC Inc., were often required to work more than 40 hours in a workweek without proper compensation for overtime hours worked. Many employees were also paid with checks they were unable to cash, resulting in minimum wage violations. Finally, the investigation found that the employer maintained virtually none of the employment records required by law.

The FLSA requires that companies pay covered employees at least the applicable minimum wage as well as one and one-half times their regular rates of pay for hours worked over 40 per week. The law also requires employers to maintain accurate records of employees’ wages, hours and other conditions of employment.

According to Sonia Rybak, assistant district director for the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division in White Plains, the employer was uncooperative throughout the investigation and, as a result, the department filed suit to recover back wages and damages for affected employees. On May 5, a federal judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York signed a consent judgment ordering MSC and McGuire to come into full compliance with the FLSA and to pay $82,019 in minimum wage and overtime back wages and $37,981 in liquidated damages in installment payments over six months.

The department received only one check for $10,000 from the defendants, who then reneged on paying the balance of $110,000. “As a result,” said Rybak, “our attorneys asked the court to issue ‘writs of garnishment’ on two banks where the defendants held accounts, which the court did in July. That action essentially froze the defendants’ assets held by those banks until they satisfied the previous court judgment and paid the back wages and damages.”

As a result of this action, MSC and McGuire submitted a check for $80,000 to the department on Aug. 2 and one of the garnisheed banks released $30,000 of the defendants’ assets on Aug. 23 to satisfy the judgment in full.

Said Rybak, “The Labor Department will utilize every possible legal action to ensure that employers pay their employees the wages they have rightfully earned.”

The White Plains Area Office of the Wage and Hour Division conducted this investigation and the department’s legal actions were handled by the Regional Solicitor’s Office in New York City. For more information about the provisions of the FLSA, call the Department of Labor’s toll-free help line at 1-866-4USWAGE (1-866-487-9243). Information is also available on the Internet at www.wagehour.dol.gov.

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