A dealer at a Missouri casino has filed a class-action lawsuit accusing his employer of breaking federal and state wage laws by failing to compensate its staff members fairly for their work.

The complaint, filed by Albert Astarita with the US District Court for the Western District of Missouri, describes how the Ameristar Casino Hotel in Kansas City, along with its parent company Pinnacle Entertainment, has instituted several policies in order to shortchange its employees. Read the complaint.

The first of these unfair practices, according to Astarita, is the company’s use of a rounding system when calculating employees’ hours worked. The ex-Ameristar dealer says that staff are required to clock in and commence work seven minutes before the start of their shift. But due to payroll’s policy of rounding up or down to the next 15-minute interval, employees end up working those seven minutes without being fairly compensated.

“Viewed in a vacuum, the rounding system utilized by [Pinnacle] appears to favor neither [Pinnacle] nor their employees, as [Pinnacle] utilizes the same rounding system when an employee clocks in or out,” reads the complaint. “However, [Pinnacle] utilizes a disciplinary system to alter the seemingly neutral rounding system in a manner which… is substantially rigged in [Pinnacle’s] favor.”

Astarita states that due to disciplinary measures employed by AmeriStar, employees rarely clock in after their shifts have begun. Therefore, employees are forced to start working before their official shift begins and receive no payment for the extra time.

Similarly, Astarita says, employees are required to clock out no more than seven minutes after their shift has ended. That means that, according to the 15-minute rounding system, any work after the end of an employee’s shift is unpaid.

Furthermore, the suit continues, there is no need to use a rounding system at all, as the computerized time clock is accurate up to one minute.

In the second key complaint of the lawsuit, Astarita alleges that employees are required to participate in unpaid training courses throughout their employment. He says that Pinnacle typically schedules training sessions during working hours, forcing employees to reschedule their shifts in order to attend.

“[Pinnacle] demands that dealers learn how to deal new games so that they are able to work more stations on the casino floor,” the complaint says. “Employees are led to believe that not participating in the training will have adverse effects on performance reviews, assignments to less desirable shifts or tasks, [and] termination or demotion.”

According to the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), workers must be compensated for such training sessions.

Lastly, the lawsuit claims that Pinnacle miscalculates overtime rates in order to pay less than what they owe. According to the FLSA, employees must be paid 1.5 times their regular rate after working 40 hours in a week. The law, however, allows employers to take a “tip credit” for workers who receive tips, a system Astarita claims is abused by Pinnacle.

When an employer takes a “tip credit,” he must calculate overtime on the full minimum wage, not the lower direct wage payment. Furthermore, an employer cannot take a higher tip credit for an overtime hour compared to a regular hour.

Pinnacle “calculated the overtime rate by multiplying 1.5 times the lower direct wage being earned,” the suit continues. “As a result, Plaintiff’s and other similarly situated employees’ overtime pay was not based on the proper regular rate of pay.”

Pinnacle Entertainment has not yet been reached for comment on the allegations.

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