It’s no doubt a rare thing for America to become less litigious on any given issue. But the growth in lawsuits under one law in particular — the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets the nation’s minimum-wage and overtime levels — has been particularly dramatic.
The employer-side law firm Seyfarth Shaw observed this in a blog post a few days ago. The number of wage and hour cases filed in federal court rose to 8,871 for the year ending Sept. 30, up from 1,935 in 2000. That’s an increase of 358 percent, compared to the the federal judiciary’s overall intake volume, which rose only a total of about 7 percent over the same period. (In absolute numbers, the category is still smaller than many, such as insurance and habeas corpus claims.)
So why the huge increase? Seyfarth Shaw’s attorneys think is has to do with increased attention being drawn to wage and hour issues by a Labor Department that’s been cracking down on misclassification of independent contractors, moving to change overtime rules, and promoting minimum-wage hikes on the local level. The lawyers also argue that the Fair Labor Standards Act, originally enacted in 1938, has failed to adapt from an industrial to a service-based economy, creating ambiguities that often have to be litigated to resolve (witness the lawsuits over the employment status of Uber drivers and other “gig workers”).
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