ATLANTA, Ga. — More than 400 wage and hour lawsuits against FedEx landed in Georgia’s federal courts over the past week, all filed by one litigation team, as a nationwide wave of individual overtime claims by delivery drivers reaches the state.
The suits follow a common template. Each names a single driver who says he or she reported to FedEx terminals and wore FedEx uniforms but was paid through intermediary companies the shipper calls independent service providers, regularly worked more than 40 hours a week and was never paid overtime. The drivers argue FedEx is still their employer under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.
FedEx has maintained that it is not the employer responsible for overtime because it contracts with those service providers, which it says are contractually and legally required to follow wage and hour laws.
The flood of filings traces back to Pennsylvania. More than 30,000 drivers had opted into a collective action against FedEx Ground in federal court in Pittsburgh before it was decertified. Their lawyers refiled the claims as three mass actions with more than 14,000 named plaintiffs.
On May 18, U.S. District Judge Robert J. Colville severed every plaintiff’s claim and ordered the drivers to refile in an appropriate court within 60 days or risk being time-barred. The parties paused that deadline to try mediation, which failed, and the same complaint has been filed across the country since early September.
Georgia is one of many stops. Sixty-four Nevada drivers filed at the end of September, 61 suits hit federal court in Arkansas in a single day, and more than 10,000 drivers nationwide are now part of the effort.
FedEx has previously paid nearly $500 million to settle driver misclassification claims, including a $240 million settlement in 2016 that covered about 12,000 drivers in 20 states.
