Overtime Bandits Caught
Workers get more than $30G in fraudulent overtime
By Michael Horowitz
BRONX, NEW YORK (BRONX NEWS)- A number of Co-op City employees benefited to the tune of $30,000 and more by getting overtime pay they shouldn’t have received, informed sources told The News this week.
The News first heard about the controversy, which triggered the firing of Colette Ragin as the Riverbay Corporation’s Human Resources Director, last Thursday, shortly after her termination.
The News first received word, last week that Ragin had been terminated.
The allegations were checked out Tuesday over the course of three interviews with informed sources who wished to remain unidentified.
In an initial report that The News received, the newspaper was informed that one supervisor collected more than $35,000 in overtime pay that he shouldn’t have gotten.
Ragin was reportedly fired after Co-op City’s new labor attorneys uncovered the alleged improper payments to Riverbay supervisors following an examination of classifications of management’s employees.
Now, the Riverbay supervisors who received overtime pay, over the course of a number of years, have to be concerned that management officials might require them to return the over time pay that they allegedly received improperly.
Federal and state laws allow employers to exempt supervisory employees from overtime pay if they serve in managerial capacities, such as the power to hire and fire other workers.
However, federal and state regulators have, in recent years, targeted companies, such as Walmart, for unjustly categorizing low-pay workers as supervisors to avoid having to pay them overtime for working more than 40 hours in a given week.
As cases in point, workers assigned to supervise specific departments in a Walmart store have been denied overtime pay, according to press reports.
Federal and state laws require that hourly, non-supervisory employees be paid time and a half for work over 40 hours in given weeks.
