18-hour days, no degree, and an offer letter that said it wasn’t a contract
An IT worker who spent years building and maintaining Cincinnati Bell’s phone system has lost his fight for overtime pay.
The Sixth Circuit ruled on October 29, 2026, that the worker was an exempt “computer employee” under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) - meaning Cincinnati Bell Telephone Company owed him no overtime, even though he regularly worked 18-hour days.
The worker’s history with the company stretches back to 2005, when he was at Startek, a contact center services provider preparing a proposal for Cincinnati Bell’s outsourced operations. By 2009 he had moved into a contractor role focused on developing the company’s interactive voice response (IVR) system - the automated “press 1 for billing, press 2 to cancel” technology most of us have dealt with at least once.
Getting the new IVR system off the ground took roughly two years. He sorted through documentation from the company’s previous system, mapped out technical specifications for the replacement, and worked out how to connect it to Cincinnati Bell’s databases. A “huge endeavor,” in his own words.
When Cincinnati Bell later brought its contact center operations back in-house, he was the one “guiding them through the dark” - the internal team simply did not have the knowledge he had built up over years of working on the system.
In May 2016, Cincinnati Bell offered him a W-2 position. The offer letter described him as a “Contingency 3 - IT” employee - a classification the company treats as exempt from overtime protections. It quoted a rate of $75 per hour if he declined medical coverage, which he did, but stated twice that it “does not constitute an employment contract.” He signed it and was subsequently paid a flat $3,000 per week - $75 times 40 hours - no matter how many hours he actually worked.
He stayed for several years, continuing to design, document, and update the IVR system, acting as the company’s point of contact with an outside IT provider, and troubleshooting infrastructure problems. When Cincinnati Bell acquired Hawaii Telecom in 2021, he led the integration of its contact center operations. The workload became crushing - days stretching to 18 hours, odd shifts to cover the time zone gap. After raising concerns with supervisors without success, he left in June 2023.
He then sued on two fronts: that the company violated the FLSA by failing to pay overtime, and that the offer letter created a contract entitling him to $75 for every hour worked.
The district court granted summary judgment to Cincinnati Bell. The Sixth Circuit affirmed.
On the overtime claim, the court found the worker fell squarely within the FLSA’s “computer employee” exemption. That carve-out covers workers whose main job involves the “design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing, or modification of computer systems or programs.” The court zeroed in on three of those duties - documentation, design, and development - and walked through his actual work: mapping out where and how the IVR system routed callers, gathering requirements from internal teams and end users, and proposing how the system’s flow should be structured.
The worker called it “complicated flowcharts.” The court disagreed. In an IVR system, it noted, “the design is the flow.”
He also argued his lack of formal computer science training should count in his favor. The court pointed out the statute deliberately contains no education requirement - Congress dropped that condition when it created the standalone computer employee exemption in 1996. On-the-job expertise was enough.
On the contract claim, the court found the offer letter could not be a contract when it expressly said it was not one - twice - and the worker himself testified he did not believe there was “a meeting of the minds” when he signed it. Even treating the at-will relationship as having contractual elements under Ohio law, the evidence was not enough to show the parties had agreed to $75 per hour for all hours including overtime. The offer letter said nothing about overtime or weekly hours. And his own conduct told the same story - he accepted $3,000 weekly paychecks for years, knew he could not log more than 40 hours, and raised workload complaints without ever mentioning pay.
For HR teams classifying IT roles, the decision turns on a deceptively simple question: what does the worker actually do? Not their job title, not their degree, not how they describe their own work - but the substance of their day-to-day duties.
The ruling is a published Sixth Circuit opinion. No further proceedings are indicated.
