A federal court ordered a New Jersey company and its co-managers to pay $712,000 to staff for deliberately denying overtime pay

• A New Jersey company violated labor laws by not paying staff for the full hours they worked, the DOL said.
• The firm also failed to keep accurate records of staff hours and wages, the DOL said in a lawsuit.

A federal court ordered a New Jersey company and its co-managers to pay $712,000 in back wages and damages after a Department of Labor investigation found it had deliberately denied overtime pay.

FTR Electrical & HVAC Services violated labor laws by capping staff pay at eight hours a day, no matter how long they actually worked, the Department of Labor (DOL) said in a lawsuit first filed in May 2020.

Employees regularly worked between 45 and 54 hours a week, but the company didn't pay staff extra for overtime, the DOL said.

The Union, NJ-based company, which provides electrical, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning services, also required staff to "work off the clock," and didn't keep accurate records of working hours and wage payments, the DOL said.

The company paid staff in cash for overtime hours and told them not to clock out "to conceal the fact that employees worked more than forty hours a week," per the lawsuit. In this way, the company and its co-mangers had "willfully violated the FLSA," the DOL said.

FTR Electrical & HVAC Services said that it had violated some sections of the Fair Labor Standards Act, including not paying staff for all the hours they worked, not paying staff a premium for overtime hours, and not keeping full records of hours and wages, per legal filings viewed by Insider.

The US District Court for the District of New Jersey ordered the company, a part-owner, and a vice-president to pay $355,846.92 in back wages for unpaid overtime and another $355,846.92 in liquidated damages to the 89 affected workers, per a February 3 legal filing. The company and co-managers also had to pay almost $3,000 in interest alongside a $16,450 fine.

The defendants had agreed to make the payments, per the filing by US Magistrate Judge Edward S. Kiel.

The company didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

"The company and its co-managers intentionally denied overtime wages to employees and deprived them of their basic right to the wages they earned for the hard work they provided," Paula Ruffin, district director of the DOL's Wage and Hour Division in Mountainside, New Jersey, said in a statement Tuesday.