A lawsuit was recently filed on behalf of 2,000 employees of the National Beef Packing Company in Southwestern Kansas, according to The Associated Press. The suit alleges workers were not properly compensated for all of their employee attendance since the employer paid them only during "gang time," or when the entire crew was completing tasks on the running production line.

Employee lawsuits are becoming a trend in the meat packing industry, the news source reports, citing claims filed against Farmland Foods slaughterhouse in Monmouth, Illinois, in April and Creekstone Farms Premium Beef in Arkansas City, Kansas, in 2011.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) mandates that employers must pay all non-exempt workers minimum wage for all of their hours worked and overtime rates that are one-and-a-half times the regular pay rate for any time attendance beyond 40 in a single workweek.

While the FLSA does consider employees exempt from those labor rights as they meet the requirements for administrative, professional, outside sales, computer employee or executive positions, it does not consider manual laborers who perform repetitive functions to be exempt regardless of their standard pay rate.

Employers who work in these fields can track their employees' work time more easily when they install a timeclock in a convenient location on the premises. 

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