Jul 6, 2019 4 min read

A mine services company is fighting to avoid paying out millions of dollars after a Washington County jury found it had failed to pay its workers at Enlow Fork Mine for time they spent on the job.

Attorneys for GMS Mine Repair and Maintenance and their counterparts who represent 565 workers who were victorious in a class-action lawsuit against the company in September are due back in court on Friday for a hearing before Common Pleas Judge Michael Lucas, who presided over their three-day trial in September.

The opposing parties in the case are at odds over the plaintiffs’ contention that GMS owes the workers nearly $1.5 million in additional damages and attorneys’ fees and costs beyond a nearly $1.2 million compensation award based on the jury’s verdict.

Lucas will also hear arguments over GMS’s contention that he should grant the company “compulsory nonsuit, entry of judgment and/or a new trial” and rescind the certification of the mine workers as a class.

Attorneys for the underground mine workers – whose lead class representative is Joseph Bonds of Wheeling, W.Va. – alleged that Garrett County, Maryland-based GMS had forced its employees to work off the clock by having them arrive early before taking a shuttle to the mine’s Pleasant Grove entrance in East Finley Township and kept them on the job after their regular shifts for safety meetings, drug testing and various other duties.

The case was filed in Washington County in 2015, after a claim under the Fair Labor Standards was dismissed in federal court, where the workers’ lawsuit was first filed in 2013.

In September, jurors found that the plaintiffs had proved during a three-day trial that GMS had broken the state Minimum Wage Act and breached the contract with its employees.

The jury found that workers were owed wages for time they spent before and after each shift from April 27, 2012, to April 14, 2014, while employees were using a satellite parking lot and relying on the shuttle.

Jurors said the workers’ unpaid time amounted to 45 minutes for all but the first 30 days of that period, when they spent a total of 30 minutes at work before and after each shift.

The sides later stipulated that the compensation GMS would owe based on these findings would come to $1.2 million.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys from the Harrisburg firm Weisberg Cummings argue they’re entitled to fees and costs totaling roughly $669,000.

A brief prepared by Weisberg also cited an “implication” of the jury’s verdict that GMS violated the state Wage Payment and Collection Law – which allows courts to award liquidated damages for claims – to argue that GMS owes the workers another $405,000.

Finally, Weisberg claims GMS owes his clients $418,000 in prejudgment interest on the breach-of-contract claim.

GMS’s attorneys, who are from the Levicoff Law Firm in Pittsburgh, question the legal basis for those assertions.

For example, they wrote the bid for attorneys’ fees is “beyond excessive; in many respects it borders on outrageous” and questioned the underlying math.

“If not rejected entirely, Plaintiffs’ request for attorneys’ fees should be scrutinized very carefully and reduced to a reasonable amount,” the lawyers wrote in one filing.

The Levicoff attorneys also claim Lucas should have dismissed the plaintiffs’ various demands for reasons including a purported insufficiency of evidence and contend GMS’ workers didn’t make up a class for the purposes of the case because they “spent widely varied amounts of time on the pre- and post-shift activities referred to in the class definition, if any time at all.”

“Thus,” they added, “the evidence presented at trial showed that the pre- and post-shift habits of each putative class member are not at all homogeneous, but rather, are highly individualized.”

No one answered at the respective offices of either law firm involved in the case on Friday.