Steffans Legal Secures Summary Judgment in Rounding Case

On May 19, 2020, Steffans Legal filed a class action lawsuit against Table Talk Pies, Inc. In that suit, we claimed that Table Talk violated Massachusetts law relative to the payment of wages by implementing and enforcing a time-rounding policy that resulted in a substantial amount of working hours not being paid to its employees. You can read more about time rounding policies here and the Table Talk lawsuit here.

On November 30, 2022, Steffans Legal, along with co-counsel Fair Work P.C., moved for summary judgment on behalf of the workers, essentially asking that the court enter a judgment in their favor as the payroll data showed that the rounding policy resulted in a large amount of hours having been worked but not paid.

On July 10, 2023, Justice Wrenn of the Worcester County Superior Court granted that motion for summary judgment and entered judgment for the workers. In doing so, Justice Wrenn noted that:

the undisputed evidence shows that Table Talk’s timekeeping system did not compute its hourly employees’ working time so that it averaged out over a reasonable period of time; rather it ‘rounded away’ thousands of recorded hours for hundreds of employees, resulting in systematic underpayment of earned wages.

Steffans Legal has considerable experience with wage and hour case, including cases where an employer implements and enforces unbalanced time-rounding policies. If you’d like to learn more about Massachusetts wage and hour law, click below to contact us today.