Lawyers representing employees who accuse Consolidated Nuclear Security, manager of the Y-12 site in Oak Ridge Tenn., of withholding wages have withdrawn from a proposed class action lawsuit against the contractor.
The motion to withdraw as counsel was granted in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee in Knoxville on Monday. Justin Gilbert, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, said a conflict arose, but would not disclose what it was. The three named plaintiffs are interviewing potential new counsel, according to Gilbert and court documents.
Several employees filed a class action lawsuit against CNS in 2020 alleging that they and other salaried employees at Y-12 failed to receive owed wages as a result of the company moving from monthly to a bi-weekly payroll in 2015.
In 2017, according to the suit, 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.
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 on time.
