A former SMILE employee claims in a federal lawsuit that the agency failed to compensate her for overtime work and fired her when she complained about it.
Jaime Gabriel filed the lawsuit in U.S. Western District Court in Lafayette on Friday. She named both SMILE and former CEO Chris Williams as defendants.
Gabriel seeks a judgment awarding her the unpaid overtime wages, as well as 90 days of penalty wages.
According to the lawsuit, Gabriel worked at SMILE from Aug. 15, 2011, until June 29, when she was fired, according to the lawsuit.
Gabriel alleges that when Williams became CEO in January 2017, she began to have to work unpaid overtime hours.
She claims in the suit that she first complained about the problem in June 2017, but Williams told her there was a moratorium on overtime, that the agency didn’t have the money to pay her for it and that "the work had to be done."
When she requested all of her payroll records to calculate the overtime hours, Williams only provided her records for October 2017-February, Gabriel claims in the lawsuit.
She claims SMILE and Williams violated the Fair Labor Standards Act.
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