Wage & Hour Class and Collective Action Review — 2023 - Report - Page 10
I.
Introduction
Wage & hour litigation has long been a focus of the plaintiffs’ class action bar. The
relatively low standard by which plaintiffs can achieve conditional certification under the
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), often paired with state law wage & hour class claims,
offers a potent combination by which plaintiffs can pursue alleged misclassification or
unpaid overtime claims, for example. Over the last few years, approximately 6,000
FLSA collective action suits have been filed in courts nationwide each year, and there is
little reason to think that the number of filings will decrease in the near future.
In 2022 alone, there were over 2,600 new FLSA collective action lawsuits filed. This
does not include filings under state wage & hour laws or individual wage & hour actions.
The map below shows the dispersion of the filings throughout the United States.
Leading the way with new collective action lawsuits filed were New York (847), Florida
(281), Texas (234), Ohio (166), and Illinois (117).
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© Duane Morris LLP 2023
Wage & Hour Class And Collective Action Review – 2023
