A federal court could soon decide whether to hear the case of several Consolidated Nuclear Security employees who sued the Y-12 National Security Complex prime contractor in 2020 alleging lost wages.
Last week, the three employees, who seek to create a class-action lawsuit, filed a second amended complaint with the U.S. District Court for Eastern Tennessee. The amendments were intended to prove that the employees and their colleagues had indeed sued Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS) in the correct court — something CNS appeared this week to concede.
CNS, in a Tuesday response to the employees’ second amended complaint, wrote that “a substantial part of the events giving rise to the claim occurred within the Court’s judicial district and thus venue is proper.”
CNS filed its response about a week after U.S. District Judge Katherine Crytzer ordered the plaintiffs to refine their lawsuit, filed in 2020, to include each of the company’s team members. The employees suing the Bechtel National-led allege that the company in 2017 withheld a paycheck’s worth of pay from thousands of salaried employees after shifting to a biweekly pay schedule in 2015 from a monthly pay schedule.
“That unlawful taking well exceeds 10 million dollars,” the plaintiffs wrote in their second amended complaint.
CNS and the employees each accuse the other of miscounting the money paid to salaried exempted employees since CNS started paying such personnel every other week instead of monthly. CNS said it overpaid for more than two years after the transition and corrected the mistake. The employees say CNS was mistaken and that what the company called a correction was an illegal withholding of earned money.
“CNS paid all employees within the time limits permitted by Tennessee law for all weeks that the employees performed work,” the company wrote in its Tuesday filing.
The prime had also argued the member companies of its limited liability corporation were not Tennessee citizens, though that argument appeared this week to be falling by the wayside.
The plaintiffs’ first amended complaint, filed in March “addressed many of the jurisdictional deficiencies contained in the initial complaint,” Judge Crytzer wrote in an April filing. However, the employees forgot to include in their complaint CNS team member SOC.
So, Crytzer ordered the plaintiffs to touch up their complaint again, resulting in the second amended complaint that gave rise to CNS’s latest filing in the case.
