Avis Budget Car Rental will pay $7.8 million to settle a wage theft lawsuit brought by its managers. On April 28, 2016, Judge Eric N. Vitaliano, United States District Court Judge in the Southern District of New York, approved the settlement. The settlement covers 251 current and former shift managers who joined the lawsuit and will receive a proportional share of the settlement.
The Settlement resolves two litigations; the original lawsuit was filed in 2008 in federal Court in Manhattan and a parallel lawsuit was filed in federal Court in New Jersey in 2011. Both lawsuits alleged that Avis misclassified its shift managers as supervisory personnel who were ineligible for overtime under the executive exemption of the Fair Labor Standards Act, even though their jobs differed little from those of their hourly subordinates. The lawsuit also alleged that the shift managers’ work consisted mostly of non-managerial tasks such as “renting, cleaning, shuttling and checking-in vehicles, as well as the tedious counting of vehicles.” The shift managers alleged they had little role in hiring or firing employees, according to the FLSA misclassification lawsuit.
