They say they averaged 12.5 hours a day, six days a week, doing manual labor
A national auto service chain is facing allegations that it worked store managers to the bone while dodging overtime pay.
Two former store managers have taken Monro, Inc. to court, claiming the company classified them as exempt employees while requiring them to work punishing schedules that left little room for anything resembling work-life balance. The lawsuit, filed on January 5 in the United States District Court for the Western District of New York, targets the company's Tire Choice Auto Service Centers brand.
Monro is no small player. The publicly traded company operates more than 1,200 stores across 32 states and runs several brands including Monro Auto Service, Mr. Tire, and Tire Choice. The company employs approximately 300 store managers at its Tire Choice locations at any given time, and the case seeks to represent both current and former managers over the past three years.
At the heart of the dispute is a question HR professionals grapple with regularly: when does a manager stop being a manager?
The lawsuit alleges that Tire Choice slapped the exempt label on its store managers despite the fact that their day-to-day work looked nothing like what the Fair Labor Standards Act envisions for executive employees. According to court documents, these managers spent nearly all their time performing non-managerial manual labor, helping customers and working on vehicles.
The numbers paint a demanding picture. Store managers were allegedly required to work a minimum of 52 hours per week. In practice, plaintiffs Anthony Daley Speranza and Raymond Thomas Henry Jr say they averaged around 12.5 hours a day, six days a week. Speranza claims he worked open to close, seven days a week, during a stretch from August to November 2023, taking just eight days off during his first six and a half months on the job.
Despite these hours, the managers saw no overtime pay. When you do the math on their actual hours worked, their compensation amounted to somewhere between $15 and $17 an hour, according to the filing.
The lawsuit points to a labor allocation system that allegedly made long hours unavoidable. Tire Choice's corporate office reportedly capped the number of hours stores could assign to hourly workers each week, but those limits did not apply to salaried managers. When staffing ran thin, managers had to pick up the slack themselves.
The plaintiffs are seeking unpaid overtime wages and additional damages. No determination on the merits has been made, and the case remains in its early stages.
For HR leaders watching from the sidelines, this case underscores a familiar risk. Exempt classifications require more than a title and a salary. When employees spend most of their time doing the same work as their hourly colleagues, that exemption may not hold up under scrutiny.
