As sigh of relief, IT giant - Cognizant has finally agreed to pay its former employees $5.7 million to compensate them for their unpaid overtime hours. This decision came after they reached a class-action settlement agreement recently.
Cognizant's former employee identified as Debi Mishra and few other employees along with her, who were part of the class action; worked in the quality engineering & assurance (QE&A) team.
As per a Times of India (ToI) report, Mishra, who worked for Cognizant’s client Blue Shield based in California, filed a lawsuit alleging that Cognizant underpaid overtime by failing to include certain amounts when calculating the regular rate of pay. He resigned in 2015.
Also, the publication, which had a copy of the court document, stated that Mishra received a letter in 2012 saying the terms and conditions of his employment had changed. Even, the company had informed him that his position has been classified as overtime eligible.
Meanwhile, the letter also indicated that Mishra was guaranteed to earn no less than $62,100, keeping in mind the bonus that would be added to keep his annual income at this level. But, the actual payments that Mishra received was very low.
Shocked Mishra assigned a counsel to review and analyse the data. As per his calculations, the total potential damages for all employees involved was $11,219,891. After which, Cognizant rejected this analysis and claimed that Mishra and other class members did not actually work overtime hours and instead merely recorded overtime as a means of obtaining faster and more evenly spread pay, Times of India further reported.
After the original complaint which was filed in August 25, 2017, most probably a year later both the parties came forward and put forward their case before a retired judge but did not reach a solution.
As per a recent settlement, Cognizant needs to pay about half of what was estimated to the employees as damages by the plaintiffs. This big amount will be divided among the class members, the publication finally stated.
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