California-based 24 Hour Fitness sued 14 former employees in Las Vegas this week in a dispute over claims they didn't receive overtime pay they deserved.
The business is demanding the former employees arbitrate their wage claims in Nevada, rather than California, where the company is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay area.
The former employees were personal trainers and managers who stopped working for 24 Hour Fitness locally between 2002 and 2004.
They later became part of a class-action federal lawsuit in San Francisco filed in 2006 by hundreds of 24 Hour Fitness workers.
The suit claimed trainers weren’t paid for all the time they worked and that managers were misclassified as not being eligible for overtime, allowing the company to sidestep requirements to pay them for their extra hours, both of which would be violations of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.
The damage claims appear to be substantial, ranging from tens of thousands of dollars in the cases of some former workers to more than $500,000 in others.
The San Francisco suit involved only 24 Hour Fitness workers who had worked for the chain outside of California. A separate suit for its California workers had been settled for $37 million.
In February, a federal judge in San Francisco “decertified” the classes in the lawsuit involving non-California workers. He found their claims were not common enough to be asserted as a class action as employment practices differed from club to club.
The judge's action prompted attorneys for 983 workers in the lawsuit to submit their wage and overtime claims to private arbitration with a firm in San Francisco.
In the lawsuits filed against the 14 former workers in U.S. District Court for Nevada this week, 24 Hour Fitness seeks to avoid arbitrating their claims before the firm in San Francisco.
24 Hour Fitness attorneys said the workers had agreed to arbitrate disputes under a 2001 employment agreement.
Attorneys for 24 Hour Fitness said that while that agreement is “silent on the location of the arbitration hearing, there exists no reason why the hearing should be held someplace other than the location where claimant last worked for 24 Hour Fitness.”
“Relevant witnesses and documents will likely be located in or near the location where the claimant worked. It would be absurd to require claimant and all percipient witnesses to travel from Las Vegas to California or some other location for a hearing,” 24 Hour Fitness charged in the lawsuits.
A request for comment was placed with attorneys for the defendant former workers.