Labor Department Wins New Try at Overtime Pay for Unitil Workers

The Labor Department can try again to show that Unitil Service Corp. owes its dispatchers and controllers unpaid wages after the First Circuit clarified the proper analysis for evaluating whether an overtime exemption applies.

Courts must determine whether workers are administrative and therefore exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime requirements using a relational analysis, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit said.

Unitil Service is a subsidiary of Unitil Corp., a public utility holding company that owns firms providing gas or electricity to approximately 200,000 customers in New England. Unitil operates centralized electric and gas ...