Employees suing Consolidated Nuclear Security over allegedly withheld wages got new lawyers this week and want more time to answer the company’s motion to dismiss their case, court documents show.
The plaintiffs want an extension to the May 9 deadline the court set to proceed with the case or have it thrown out. Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS) filed its motion to dismiss on May 9.
The employees of the manager of the Y-12 site in Oak Ridge Tenn., had until midnight on May 9 to identify their new lawyers after the attorneys who organized the suit dropped the case over an unspecified conflict.
It appears, according to documents filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee in Knoxville, that the plaintiffs secured new attorneys, who then filed a motion to extend the time to file a status report in the case. The court had yet to rule on the motion as of deadline Friday.
District Judge Katherine A. Crytzer did not mince words on her April 24 order to stay the case until May 9.
“Absent appropriate cause, the Court will not delay this matter any further,” she wrote. “A failure to fully and timely comply with this Order will result in dismissal of Plaintiffs claims against Defendant.”
The plaintiff’s original lawyers in March bowed out of the suit, filed in 2020, which claims that the plaintiffs and other salaried employees at Y-12 failed to receive owed wages as a result of the company moving to a bi-weekly payroll from a monthly payroll in 2015.
Attorneys for Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS) filed a motion to dismiss the case on May 9, maintaining their argument that the plaintiffs are wrong.
“Plaintiffs admit CNS paid them for every pay period they worked,” the CNS motion for summary judgement says. “Their principal argument is that when CNS informed them of their ‘annual salary’ for 2017, that created a quasicontractual right to receive that ‘annual salary’ within calendar year 2017. They are wrong for several reasons.”
As of Friday morning, the court had not ruled on the motion to dismiss.
The plaintiffs James Myers, James Young and Douglas Messerli allege that CNS illegally withheld a total of $10 million from thousands of employees. CNS said in court filings that it paid its employees in Tennessee that money.
It was not clear why the three named plaintiffs needed new lawyers. Justin Gilbert, one of the plaintiff’s former lawyers, told the Exchange Monitor that a conflict arose but would not say what it was.
In the lawsuit, plaintiffs allege that in 2017, CNS told its salaried employees at Y-12 they had been paid in advance and that the company “intended to ‘realign’ their pay with another plant.” The suit alleges that CNS then paid its salaried employees for only 25 of 26 biweekly periods.
“In truth, the Y-12 salaried employees were not paid in advance,” the suit alleges. “Thus, CNS unlawfully took one biweekly check from all salaried … employees in June 2017,” amounting to a four percent loss in annual income, according to the initial complaint filed in 2020.
The three employees who are named plaintiffs in the suit against CNS claim to represent a class that includes all current and former Y-12 employees at the time of the alleged “pay date realignment. The class action has not yet been certified.
