Butterball Nabs Pretrial End to Workers’ Unpaid Wage Lawsuit

Butterball LLC defeated a suit seeking wages on an hourly basis because the company explicitly told workers it would pay them per truckload of turkeys handled, a federal judge said.

There’s no genuine dispute over whether the workers were piece-rate employees, so Butterball is entitled to summary judgment, the US District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina said. The workers also failed to place the accuracy of Butterball’s records or overtime calculations in dispute, the order said.

Plaintiff Osvaldo Figueroa, who caught and loaded turkeys onto trucks that transported them to the slaughterhouse, sued under the Fair ...