In Greathouse v. JHS Security, 12-4521-cv (2nd Cir. April 20, 2015), the Second Circuit (panel: Carney, Pooler, Korman) held that, in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Kasten v. Saint-Gobain (2011), the FLSA’s retaliation provision (29 USC 215) is not restricted to written complaints to a government agency, but is broad enough to prohibit retaliation against employees for oral complaints made to employers.
The court overruled its 1993 decision in Lambert v. Genesee Hospital (to the extent that case held “that section 215(a)(3) requires an employee to have filed a complaint with a government agency as a predicate for an FLSA retaliation claim”) and concluded that
an employee may premise a [29 USC] 215(a)(3) retaliation action on an oral complaint made to an employer, so long as … the complaint is sufficiently clear and detailed for a reasonable employer to understand it, in light of both content and context, as an assertion of rights protected by the statute and a call for their protection.
Congratulations to my colleague Penn Dodson, who represented the plaintiff-appellant.