Mission Support Alliance (MSA) has asked a federal judge to dismiss on summary judgment a lawsuit brought by 13 current and former fire captains or platoon sergeants at Hanford who are seeking overtime pay for time routinely worked beyond 40 hours a week. The case was filed against the Hanford support services contractor in April 2018 in Eastern Washington District U.S. Court.
MSA told Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson that the fire captains are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) overtime requirements because they are highly compensated, earning more than $100,000 annually. It also argued that they are exempt because their primary duty is the non-manual work of commanding a Hanford fire station.
Each station has a fire captain assigned for each shift. Duties include making sure the station has adequate staff, participating in the morning management conference call, delegating tasks within the station, preparing incident reports and inspecting buildings to prepare emergency plans.
“The fact that a captain may engage in front-line emergency response duties from time to time does not alter the fact that those duties are not the captains’ primary duties,” MSA said in court documents. Emergency response takes only a fraction of their work time, it said.
Plaintiffs filed a counter motion asking that the judge find MSA is liable to pay overtime at time and a half. The Department of Labor has held that first-line supervisors who engage in firefighting and emergency response are required to be paid FLSA overtime, they said.
Plaintiffs said that fire captains are first and foremost firefighters and first responders. The fire captains’ most important job is to respond with their crews to calls for fire and emergency service, with office duties secondary, they said.
Fire captains do not manage their crew members, plaintiffs said. Instead, battalion chiefs who are assigned to oversee all three fire stations each shift, manage crew members, they said. The fire captains to not approve timecards, do not hire personnel, do not complete performance evaluations for their crew members and have no authority to issue disciplinary actions, plaintiffs said.
MSA asked that if the judge rules that fire captains are not exempt from overtime pay that she not impose double damages in the case. They are not warranted because MSA has acted with honest intention to exempt fire captains from overtime, MSA said. For 70 years various Hanford contractors that have been in charge of firefighting have classified the fire captains as exempt and MSA continued that when it was awarded a contract a decade ago, it said.
The judge also has the option of extending the statute of limitations for recovering damages for three, rather than two, years of pay if the employers’ violation of the FLSA is willful. MSA argued against the longer statute of limitations, saying it had ample reason to classify the fire captains as exempt.
Plaintiffs have asked for both double damages and a three-year statute of limitation. A hearing is scheduled for May 14 at the Spokane, Wash., federal courthouse.
