NBC, Sony Face OT Suit Over PA Workers On 'The Blacklist'

Law360, Los Angeles (September 16, 2015, 10:13 PM ET) — Employees tasked with defending parking spaces for the production vehicles of the NBCUniversal show “The Blacklist” accused the companies who make the show, including Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., of cheating them out of overtime pay and altering their paychecks, according to a New York federal suit entered Wednesday.
Plaintiffs Corey Leach and Anthony Jacob filed the class and collective action alleging Fair Labor Standards Act violations on behalf of parking production assistants, who can spend several consecutive days at a time holding spaces for production trucks in New York City without breaks, according to the suit.
The PAs worked four to six days a week, for 50-90 hours a week or more, holding parking spaces and sets for the James Spader-helmed TV show, according to the suit. But the production companies paid them a flat rate of about $160 per shift that disguised the amount of overtime the workers were owed under federal law, the workers said.
“Although it is an ‘industry custom’ to pay television and production employees by a flat shift pay, defendants’ practice of paying a flat-shift did not accurately compensate plaintiffs for their overtime hours as required by FLSA and New York Labor Law,” Leach said in his suit.
Leach is also the lead plaintiff in a suit entered Friday in the same court, this time against Warner Brothers Inc., Outerbanks Entertainment and the other production companies that make “The Following,” starring Kevin Bacon.
That suit details similar allegations about the work of a parking production assistant and how it conflicts with industry-standard flat rate pay, court records show. Both suits were signed Friday, but the suit against “The Blacklist” wasn’t entered until Wednesday, according to the dockets.
It’s not Leach’s first time in the plaintiff’s seat in an FLSA collective action over the issue of parking PA pay, court records show.
In 2011, Leach lodged a wage-and-hour class action accusing Warner Bros., NBC, HBO Films, and other studios and production companies of failing to pay overtime.
In that suit, he said that during his employment on film and TV sets from 2007 to 2011, he was paid a fixed amount per 12-hour shift and never received overtime pay, despite sometimes working as much as 90 to 100 hours a week.
His work then included stints on the sets for the movies “Friends With Benefits,” “Lipstick Jungle” and “The Wackness,” as well as HBO series “The Sopranos,” according to his complaint.
That suit was dismissed in 2012.
James Vagnini of Valli Kane & Vagnini, representing the plaintiffs, told Law360 on Wednesday that the practice of hiring workers to hold parking spaces and sets is unique to New York. In other cities, police help defend the spaces needed for running a production, but in New York, the task is left to people like Leach who have to maintain round-the-clock surveillance on an area to keep it film-ready.
“Here you are working on multi-million dollar productions and you’ve got groups of people who are scraping by,” Vagnini said. “These are guys that work for a lot of locations.”
Vagnini also helmed the 2011 suit.
“Years later, these companies just can’t get it right,” he said.
Representatives for the defendants didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment late Wednesday.
Leach and Jacob are represented by Robert John Valli and James Vagnini of Valli Kane & Vagnini LLP.
Counsel information for the defendants couldn’t be immediately determined.
The cases are Corey Leach et al. v. NBCUniversal Television Group et al., case number 1:15-cv-07206, and Corey Leach et al. v. Warner Brothers Inc., case number 1:15-cv-07208, each in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
— Additional reporting by Stewart Bishop. Editing by Ben Guilfoy.
 
Original Article from: Law 360