BUS DRIVERS’ SUIT: SCHOOL DISTRICT OWES US OVERTIME
Five Palm Beach County school bus drivers say that the school district systematically denied them overtime pay for at least two years as they worked long hours transporting children.
In a federal lawsuit filed last week, the drivers allege that they routinely worked 50 hours a week and were legally entitled to higher overtime wages for the last 10 hours worked each week.
The drivers’ normal hourly pay was $14, the suit states, and their overtime wage should have been $21 an hour under federal law.
But the drivers say the school district would pay overtime wages only for three of the extra 10 hours, meaning a loss of $49 a week for each driver.
As a result, the school district “willfully engaged in a pattern of violating (federal labor law) by knowingly failing to pay the employees overtime wages for a portion of their work weeks,” the suit alleges.
“For each additional 10-hour overtime period per week, they would only be paid three hours of overtime compensation,” the suit states, “and for the remaining seven hours of overtime worked per week, they would be paid straight time.”
Mark Berkowitz, a Fort Lauderdale attorney representing the five drivers, said that the school district claimed that its contract with the bus drivers’ union capped the amount of overtime that drivers could receive in a given week.
Berkowitz said that any such arrangement would violate federal law. In the suit, he is seeking to convert the lawsuit into a class action, meaning he could sue on behalf of all of the district’s hundreds of drivers.
Officials from the school district and the bus drivers’ union did not respond to requests for comment about the suit Tuesday.
The five bus drivers participating in the suit are identified as Joel Paulot, Garry Jean, Fenel Petit-Homme, Angelia Sistrunk and Kenneth Pinnock.
Bus driver turnover was cited as a one of the causes of a major meltdown in the county’s school buses in August 2015. Afterward, the school district hired extra drivers and raised the starting pay for bus drivers to $14 from $12.37.