Opinion ID: 4367046
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Frank Medieros

Text: The district court calculated the back wages owed to Medieros in the same way it calculated the back wages owed to other nonsworn workers—by dividing the amount he was paid by his hourly rate. ODPS argues that the district court should have used a different method to calculate Medieros’s back wages because of the “unique factors regarding [his] varying services provided to ODPS customers, and the unique nature of his compensation.” In addition to working as a security guard and traffic controller, Medieros also helped ODPS schedule other workers’ assignments and recruited new customers to the business. For scheduling another worker on a job, Medieros received one dollar for every hour of service performed by the worker on that job; for recruiting a new customer, he received ten percent of the profits generated by that customer. ODPS does not argue that Medieros’s scheduling or recruiting work or additional forms of compensation are exempt from the FLSA’s overtime requirements. Instead, ODPS claims that the district court should have used some unspecified alternative method of calculating Medieros’s total hours and compensation to account for his varied work responsibilities. In its briefing in the district court, ODPS announced that “[b]ased on relevant records,” Medieros “only had a single week in which he provided services to an ODPS customer for more than 40 hours in a week.” But ODPS provided no citation to these “relevant records,” which in any event do not address Medieros’s other work activities,7 nor has it proposed any alternative method of calculating Medieros’s back wages on appeal. ODPS insists that it has no obligation “to ‘adequately explain’ its proposed damages calculations.” Citing Mt. Clemens, ODPS claims that its only burden is to “negate the reasonableness” of the DOL’s proposed calculation, not to offer a reasonable alternative. But 7In his interview with the DOL investigator, which was memorialized in a personal interview statement admitted into evidence, Medieros reported that he worked an average of 50 hours per week. Nos. 17-5995/6071 Acosta v. Off Duty Police Servs., et al. Page 20 this argument misses the point. The reasonableness of the DOL’s proposed calculation depends in part on the availability of other, more reasonable alternatives to that proposal. The fact that ODPS cannot identify any reasonable alternative to the DOL’s calculation is highly probative of whether the DOL’s proposed method is reasonable. And more importantly, to the extent that the DOL’s calculation provides only a rough estimate of the back wages owed to Medieros, that imprecision is a result of ODPS’s failure to keep accurate and complete records. Courts will not punish employees for their employer’s failure to comply with the FLSA’s recordkeeping requirements. “Disapproving of an estimated-average approach simply due to lack of complete accuracy would ignore the central tenant of Mt. Clemens—an inaccuracy in damages should not bar recovery for violations of the FLSA or penalize employees for an employer’s failure to keep adequate records.” Monroe, 860 F.3d at 412. Although the calculation adopted by the district court may be imprecise, it is the best method available in light of ODPS’s failure to maintain accurate and complete records. We therefore affirm the district court’s calculation.