Two former employees have filed a class-action lawsuit against Rocket Mortgage for allegedly failing to pay overtime wages. That’s at least the second case that targets the Detroit-based lender for unpaid wages.
Brittany Roseboro and John Glover claim that Rocket’s leadership required them to attend unpaid pre-shift meetings and, due to technological delays and other problems, they usually had an uncompensated preliminary “boot-up” and “clock-in” time. Defendants also said they had to attend mandatory training and tests without compensation.
The lawsuit was filed on August 10 in a U.S. district court in Michigan on behalf of all Michigan-based Rocket employees.
A spokesperson for Rocket said the company “will vigorously defend the reputation we have built by doing the right thing for our team members and we are confident we will be vindicated from the false allegations once the facts of the case are presented.”
Roseboro and Glover, two non-exempt employees at Rocket, were responsible for “making outbound calls to existing and new customers to solicit additional business opportunities for Rocket Mortgage.”
According to the lawsuit, Roseboro and Glover had to attend off-the-clock pre-shift meetings with their supervisors and team members virtually daily. These meetings often started approximately 15 minutes before their formal shift and extended past the formal shift start time.
The meetings usually took place away from their workstations, so they could not “boot up” their computer systems until after the meeting. And the process to boot up and clock in often took 2-10 minutes, depending on technological delays. Employees were not compensated for this extra time, the lawsuit states.
Defendants claim they were required to undergo extensive training “off-the-clock.” They were also tested daily for two to three months after the training period on practice or section tests.
“Defendant Rocket willfully ‘suffered or permitted’ the Collective members to perform labor without payment of overtime compensation at a rate of not less than one-and-one-half times their regular hourly rate of pay for hours worked in excess of forty in a week as required by federal law,” the lawsuit states.
Rocket is engaged in another dispute with former employees for unpaid overtime wages.
In January, former bankers filed a class action against Rocket, claiming the company violated the Fair Labor Standards Act. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Arizona, alleges that Rocket did not pay for the overtime, which should be billed at 1.5 times the hourly pay for hours worked in excess of 40 per week. The class action lawsuit targets current and former employees. The lender denied the allegations in a statement to HousingWire.
