Welcome to the Hotel COVID Lockdown – Seafood Employees Allege Failure to Pay and False Imprisonment

Now in its 10th week and including 177 cases, Barnes & Thornburg LLP’s Wage & Hour Practice Group continues to catalog COVID-19 related workplace complaints filed in courts around the country. The tracker includes new interactive functionality, allowing readers to view a breakdown of the number cases filed in each state and the chronological timeline of when each of these cases was filed organized by topic. As we have mentioned in previous blogs, we continue to see an uptick in workplace class and collective actions directly related to COVID-19, or filings where plaintiffs’ counsel have attempted to tie a class or collective-wide wage and hour violation to the pandemic. Although the number of cases indirectly related to COVID-19 are difficult to quantify, our non-scientific observation is that there has also been a marked increase in wage and hour class and collective action filings, in general, over the last two to three months.