Employees suing Consolidated Nuclear Security over allegedly withheld wages responded late last week to the company’s request that a court throw the case out, again arguing that the contractor shorted them a paycheck in 2017.
Plaintiffs James Myers, James Young and Douglas Messerli have so far been unsuccessful in certifying a class action lawsuit on behalf of fellow employees at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, which is managed by Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS).
The named plaintiffs filed their June 16 motion in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee in Knoxville on their own behalf. Without third-party attorneys, the case cannot reach class-action status. Meyers, Young and Messerli have struggled to maintain a stable of lawyers to represent them but say they are again in talks with attorneys, according to last week’s filings.
Answering a CNS request for summary judgment to dismiss the case, the employees said June 16 that the company’s motion “contains factual inaccuracies” and plaintiffs “emphatically disagree,” with the company’s claims that they paid them in full for calendar year 2017.
Specifically, CNS claimed in its request for judgment that the “plaintiffs admit CNS paid them for every pay period they worked” and that they were “’at will’ employees and, under Tennessee law, CNS had the right to make prospective changes to their compensation.”
“Defendant has not proven the 2017 annual salary was met and only the CNS Y-12 salaried-exempt employees received twenty-five of their twenty-six scheduled biweekly paychecks due to the mis-synchronization of payrolls between the two CNS sites, whereas CNS Pantex salaried-exempt employees received their twenty-six biweekly paychecks,” the plaintiffs said.
CNS manages both Y-12 and the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, on behalf of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The contracts run through fiscal 2024, but the government holds options to keep CNS at Pantex through fiscal year 2025 and at Y-12 through fiscal year 2027.
The plaintiffs claim that when CNS attempted to synchronize payroll schedules between the two plants in 2017, the company “deleted” one biweekly paycheck for 80 hours of work. The change was made in June 2017, during which employees were scheduled to receive three biweekly checks, which the company said would “minimize the impact on affected employees as much as possible,” according to the plaintiffs.
“The one June 2017 biweekly paycheck ‘shorted’ or ‘deleted’ from the payroll schedule was never put back on any CNS payroll schedule,” the employees said in their response to CNS.
