Accenture Subsidiary Settles Overtime Pay Dispute

N3 LLC, a subsidiary of Accenture LLP, has reached a settlement with a group of inside sales employees to resolve allegations that it unlawfully withheld overtime pay from them. The parties reported to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia that they were working on a written settlement, but they did not disclose the settlement terms to the court.

Austin, the named plaintiff, and other employees, claimed that N3 had wrongfully denied them overtime pay necessary to meet performance goals, even though it knew the workers had to work more than 40 hours per week to reach those goals. The workers also reported that N3 encouraged them to work off the clock to reach these performance goals.

N3 and Accenture denied all wrongdoing and opposed class certification, arguing that the employees’ claims suffered from a lack of uniformity based on their individual choices. A few weeks ago, the federal judge handling the case granted conditional collective certification to the group of employees, in regard to N3 only, in Austin v. N3 LLC et al., case number 1:21-cv-01354. The judge found that although the employees had different job titles, they all performed the same function of soliciting potential clients for N3 clients, received the same pay, and were subject to the same performance goals.

Austin originally filed suit against N3 in April 2021, alleging that N3 violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in encouraging him and other employees to work additional hours without pay. He also claimed that N3 violated FLSA in failing to include the value of the bonuses that employees earned in calculating overtime when the company did pay for the additional hours worked.

According to Austin, N3 owed him and other salespersons premium overtime pay for the time they worked off the clock. Austin claimed to have frequently worked more than 40 hours per week and through his lunch hour to meet company performance goals.

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