Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, WAGE-HOUR—OVERTIME—7th Cir.: Fired prison healthcare employee failed to substantiate overtime claims, (Jan 23, 2025)

By Jason Albright, J.D.

The former employee’s evidence of her daily schedule lacked specificity and suffered from inconsistencies.

JAB Management Services, Inc. was entitled to summary judgment against the claims of a fired technical support specialist and longtime employee who alleged the prison healthcare company failed to pay her for overtime she allegedly worked pursuant to the FLSA, the Seventh Circuit held. Finding that the employee failed to come forward with sufficient, non-conclusory evidence that would allow a rational trier of fact to conclude that she worked uncompensated overtime, the appeals court observed that she was free to design her own schedule, and that the evidence of her schedule lacked specificity and was inconsistent (Osborn v. JAB Management Services, Inc., No. 24-1573 (7th Cir. Jan. 22, 2025)).

Medical care for inmates. Advanced Correctional Healthcare (ACH) contracts with localities to provide inmates with medical care. JAB Management is a wholly owned subsidiary of ACH responsible for hiring employees to work for some of ACH’s other subsidiaries, including Advanced Inmate Medical Management. Advanced Inmate Medical, in turn, manages ACH’s electronic medical records system—a system that healthcare personnel rely on to track the provision of inmate care.

Longtime employee. JAB Management hired the plaintiff as an administrative assistant in 2009. She was promoted several times and began to work more with Advanced Inmate Medical’s records system. Among her new responsibilities were troubleshooting software issues and overseeing a database that tracked the system’s quality.

Promotion. By 2016, she was promoted to technical support specialist. In that role, she started providing on-call support to ACH customers, including on issues related to the records system.

Salaried and remote. JAB Management designated the technical support specialist position as salaried. As a result, she says she could not enter time outside of 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. into the employer’s timekeeping system. The position was also designated as remote. According to one of her supervisors, although typical business hours were 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., the employee’s remote position offered her the flexibility to design her own schedule.

Did not keep track of alleged overtime. The employee did not keep track of any time she worked over 40 hours. However, she alleged she worked an average of 10 hours per day and 15 hours of overtime per week. She alleged that she regularly had to work outside normal business hours to take support calls, respond to emails, drive to client sites, and “patch servers.” In addition, she alleged that she worked Saturdays and Sundays, though the extent of that work varied weekly.

Alleged performance issues, discharge. Toward the end of the employee’s employment, her supervisors became increasingly dissatisfied with her ability to communicate and manage her workload. According to one supervisor, the employee failed to explain what she was working on throughout the day yet complained about having too much to do. Some of her tasks were reassigned to her coworkers, and she received coaching. She nonetheless continued to have trouble finishing her work, and on August 2, 2021 she was fired.

Lawsuit. Following her discharge, the employee sued JAB Management alleging, among other things, that it failed to pay her overtime in violation of the FLSA. JAB moved for summary judgment. Although it designated her position as salaried, it agreed for purposes of its motion to treat her as a nonexempt employee eligible for overtime pay. It also did not dispute her contention that, assuming it violated the FLSA, it did so willfully, and, as a result, the FLSA’s three-year statute of limitations would apply.

Decision below and appeal. Accordingly, the district court analyzed whether the employee produced sufficient evidence to show JAB failed to pay her overtime at any point between February 23, 2019—three years before she sued—and her August 2, 2021 discharge. The court invoked the standard of proof that applies to overtime pay cases in which an employer fails to maintain accurate time records, and it held that she failed to “prove by a just and reasonable inference the amount and extent of work she performed during the relevant time period.”

She appealed to the Seventh circuit.

Appropriate standard. The appeals court initially observed that the just and reasonable inference standard “applies to damages questions only after an employee has met the initial burden to ‘establish[] liability’ by showing that the employee performed uncompensated overtime work.” It does not, as here, apply to the employee’s threshold burden of proving a violation of the FLSA.

On that question—“whether the plaintiff worked overtime at all”—the typical burden of proof applies, Fed. R. Civ. P. 56 governs, and under Rule 56, an employee “must show what evidence [she] has that would convince a trier of fact to” agree that her employer violated the FLSA.

Insufficient evidence. Thus, analyzing whether the employee came forward with sufficient evidence to survive summary judgment on the question of JAB Management’s liability, the Seventh Circuit found that she had not met her burden. First, her job description indicated her position “operate[d] in a remote office setting,” and the description also listed her hours as 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. Yet, by failing to respond to JAB Management’s statement of undisputed material facts, she admitted that she was free to design her own schedule.

Lack of specificity. Turning to what that typical schedule looked like, the appeals court noted that the employee alleged she worked an average of 15 hours of overtime per week, but her evidence lacked the specificity required for a reasonable jury to understand how she reached that figure. At her deposition, when asked to explain how she calculated her overtime estimate, she said, “I figure I work at least ten hours a day, and on the weekends, it was pretty easy to come up with that, a norm.” And when pressed on what she did for 10 hours a day, her response was vague. She answered: “Customer issues, the database, the reports, it is very labor intensive.” Absent from the record was any accounting of how long it took her to complete the allegedly “labor intensive” tasks or how often she engaged in them throughout the workweek.

Further, as to the number of hours she spent working weekends, according to the Seventh Circuit, all she could say was that sometimes she worked a couple of hours and sometimes she worked all day. And though she alleged that several of her former coworkers could testify regarding the number of hours she worked in a week, she failed to offer their sworn testimony.

Inconsistency. In addition to lacking specificity, the employee’s evidence of her schedule was inconsistent, according to the appeals court. She claimed, for instance, that JAB Management was understaffed and that she was the sole employee responsible for providing on-call customer support from February 2020 to August 2021, but she also admitted that the number of calls she fielded substantially declined in April 2020 thanks to improvements made to ACH’s electronic medical records system.

“One would expect [her] alleged overtime to have declined as well,” the Seventh Circuit noted, “Yet, she says she worked ten hours per day and fifteen hours of overtime per week across the entire period at issue.”

Because the employee’s evidence of her daily schedule lacked specificity and suffered from inconsistencies, the appeals court found that it was left to speculate about how many hours she worked per week and “[a] jury would be left guessing too.” Because she thus failed to carry her initial burden of showing she worked unpaid overtime at all, the employer was entitled to summary judgment.

The case is No. 24-1573.

Judge: Brennan, M.

Attorneys: Noah Sklar Hurwitz (Law Offices of Noah Sklar Hurwitz) for Tara Osborn. Stephen M. Buck (Quinn Johnston) for JAB Management Services, Inc. dba Advanced Correctional Healthcare, Inc.

Companies: JAB Management Services, Inc.; Advanced Correctional Healthcare, Inc.

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