Dive Brief:

• The phrase "the shoe is on the other foot" may be the perfect description of what happened to the U.S. Department of Labor this week, as the agency settled a $7 million lawsuit for its pay practices, according to SHRM.
• A decade ago, the American Federation of Government Employees Local 12 sued the Labor Dept. on behalf of its members. The gripe was the way the Labor Dept. paid some of its workers, which the union said was in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
• According to the lawsuit, Labor Dept. employees often worked off-the-clock, without pay, and when they worked more than 40 hours in a week, some were not paid properly. Finally, SHRM reports that the settlement also said that the Labor Dept. misclassified some workers under the FLSA's administrative exemption.

Dive Insight:

"A large portion of the settlement is allocated to back pay and to compensate employees who, in some cases, worked overtime hours for years without compensation," according to an Aug. 12 statement by Snider and Associates, a law firm in Baltimore that represented the union.

"It's fair to say no one on the planet cares more about the FLSA and securing compliance than the DOL," Paul DeCamp, an attorney with Jackson Lewis in the Washington, D.C., area., told SHRM. DeCamp said the fact that the Labor Dept. settled indicates that the FLSA could be the problem, not a well-meaning employer.

In the settlement, the department didn't admit to any wrongdoing or FLSA violations.