Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, WAGE-HOUR—CLASS ACTIONS—D. Mass.: Call center employee’s putative class claims concerning ‘system setup’ time dismissed, (Jun 8, 2026)

By Jason Albright, J.D.

She and coworkers routinely performed work-related tasks before their shifts were scheduled to start, consisting largely of booting up their computers and logging into all necessary software programs.

SimpliSafe, Inc., is entitled to dismissal of putative class claims brought under the Virginia Overtime Wage Act by a “Loyalty Account Specialist” who alleged that she and her coworkers should have been paid for certain time they spent turning on their computers and getting ready for work, and that SimpliSafe additionally improperly excluded certain compensation from its calculation of their regular rate, a federal district court in Massachusetts found. The allegations underlying her FLSA and VOWA claims are identical, VOWA explicitly adopts violation of the FLSA as its standard for liability, and where, as here, “the state law protects only those rights already protected by the federal law, it is preempted” (Campbell v. SimpliSafe, Inc., No. 25-11946-FDS (D. Mass. June 3, 2026)).

Home security company and call centers. SimpliSafe, Inc., according to the court, is a Massachusetts corporation that provides home-security services, including the sale and installation of home-monitoring equipment, remote monitoring, and security guard and police dispatching. The company employs a number of call-center workers to answer inbound telephone calls and provide support to customers and potential clients. The call-center workers have various job titles, including “Loyalty Account Specialist,” “Customer Success Specialist,” “Customer Loyalty Agent,” and “Inbound Sales Specialist.”

Compensation and timekeeping. The call-center workers’ compensation consists of an hourly rate of pay; “Loyalty Bonuses,” which are performance-based incentives calculated based on various factors; and “Shift Differentials,” which are a higher hourly rate paid for work done after certain times of day and on weekends. SimpliSafe requires the employees to record their time worked by using electronic timekeeping software to clock in and out, and it requires that they be “fully logged into all necessary systems and capable of handling customer calls by the scheduled start of their shifts and upon returning from unpaid meal breaks.”

“System Setup Process.” Call-center workers thus routinely perform work-related tasks before their shifts are scheduled to start, consisting largely of booting up their computers and logging into all necessary software programs, what the complaint terms the “System Setup Process.” The plaintiff alleges that this practice effectively requires the call-center employees to work without pay and to work more than 40 hours per week without receiving overtime compensation.

Bonuses and shift differentials. The complaint also asserts that SimpliSafe improperly excluded the “Loyalty Bonuses” and “Shift Differentials” employees earned from its calculation of their regular rate of pay for purposes of the FLSA. Thus, even when SimpliSafe does pay overtime, according to the complaint, they still receive less than the 1.5 times their properly calculated “regular rate” to which they are entitled.

“Loyalty Account Specialist.” The plaintiff worked for SimpliSafe for approximately two years, from September 2022 to November 2024, as a “Loyalty Account Specialist.” She worked primarily from her home in Tappahannock, Virginia, but she would occasionally also work from the employer’s call center in Richmond. She alleged that there were “many weeks” in which she worked more than 40 hours, counting time before she was actively logged into the phone queue and capable of receiving calls, which was the only time SimpliSafe’s system would record. As a result of certain technical delays, her clock-in time was often delayed by between five minutes and one hour beyond her scheduled shift start, but SimpliSafe refused to pay her for that time. Her complaint also included similar allegations regarding other opt-in plaintiffs.

Lawsuit and present motion. Alleging that SimpliSafe violated the FLSA and the Virginia Overtime Wage Act (VOWA) by failing to pay her for time spent on the System Setup Process; by failing to pay her for overtime when she worked more than 40 hours in a week as a result of time spent on the System Setup Process; and by failing to include the “Loyalty Bonus” and “Shift Differential” payments in calculating her regular rate, the plaintiff filed her initial complaint on July 8, 2025.

SimpliSafe moved to dismiss the VOWA claim.

FLSA preemption. The court initially observed that, although the FLSA contains a savings clause with respect to state laws that are more protective of workers’ rights, numerous courts have recognized that the FLSA provides “the exclusive remedy for enforcement of rights created under the FLSA,” to the exclusion of state laws purporting to allow enforcement of those same rights.

That was the situation presented by the VOWA claim. Both the FLSA and the VOWA claims alleged that the plaintiff and other employees “worked over forty (40) hours a week for [d]efendant in multiple workweeks”; that “[d]efendant failed to pay [p]laintiff” and its other employees “for all hours worked in excess of forty (40) hours in a workweek”; and that “[d]efendant failed to pay [p]laintiff” and its other employees “overtime pay at a rate of 1.5 of their regular rates of pay.”

VOWA itself, the court noted, explicitly adopts violation of the FLSA as its standard for liability—thereby seeking to “enforce[]... rights created under the FLSA.” If the state law were more protective than the FLSA—if, for example, it provided that overtime wages should be paid after 35 hours of work per week—the FLSA’s savings clause would operate to protect any such claim from preemption. But here, where the state law protects only those rights already protected by the federal law, the court concluded, it is preempted.

The VOWA claim was accordingly dismissed.

The case is No. 25-11946-FDS.

Judge: Saylor, F.

Attorneys: Nicholas R. Conlon (Brown) for LaTonya Campbell. Alison H. Silveira (Seyfarth Shaw) for SimpliSafe, Inc.

Companies: SimpliSafe, Inc.

Cases: WageHour ClassActions Overtime WorkingTime StateLawClaims Procedure VirginiaNews MassachusettsNews