In August 2011, when Diana Wang began her seventh unpaid internship, this time at Harper’s Bazaar, the legendary high-end fashion magazine, she figured that her previous six internships – at a modeling agency, a PR firm, a jewelry designer, a magazine, an art gallery and a state governor’s office – had prepared her for the demands of New York’s fashion world.

“I was so determined to make this one really worth my while,” says the 28-year-old Wang, who moved from Columbus, Ohio, to New York, where she was living with her boyfriend (also working as an unpaid intern at one point) and living off of her savings. “I knew I couldn’t do anymore internships after this.”

As it turned out, Wang’s internship was just like many of the thousands of others: unrewarding in terms of both pay and marketable experience — not to mention the lack of a job offer. In fact, the only difference between her internship and most others was what happened about a month after it ended. Wang sued.

On Feb. 1, the law firm Outten & Golden filed a class-action lawsuit against the Hearst Corporation, which owns Harper’s Bazaar, on behalf of Wang and any other unpaid and underpaid intern who worked at the company over the past six years. The lawsuit alleges that, among other things, Hearst violated federal and state labor laws by having Wang work as many as 55 hours a week without compensation.

“It was disgusting,” says Wang, referring to her unpaid daily responsibilities like shipping hats between New York and London for $350 each way, not being able to eat lunch until 4 p.m., routinely shuttling heavy bags around Manhattan and working to 10 p.m. with no break for dinner – all while supervising eight other interns. “Thinking of the spring interns who would come in with high hopes just like my fellow interns and I had — I decided that someone had to put a stop to this practice, which was going to go on forever and get worse before it got better.”

Hearst declined to respond to the specific accusations made by Wang because of pending litigation, but the company did release a statement: “The internship programs at each of our magazines are designed to enhance the educational experience of students who are receiving academic credit for their participation, and are otherwise fully in compliance with applicable laws. We intend to vigorously defend this matter.” (Time Inc.’s policy is to pay interns. Limited exceptions may be made where appropriate, such as when a student is receiving academic credit and meets other requirements as well.)

In the workplace, there seem to be two long-established but contradictory rules: Everyone gets paid to work – unless there’s mindless drivel to do, of course, and then you get college kids to do it for free.

For decades, that seemed just fine. But that was before a couple of interns sued Fox Searchlight in September after they were tasked with the responsibilities of production assistants, bookkeepers, secretaries and janitors without wages. This wasn’t mindless coffee-fetching, they argued. These were entry-level positions that were being filled by unpaid hands. Thanks to the struggling economy, companies were now relying on interns to do entry-level work without having to pay them wages or benefits.

That lawsuit prompted other unpaid interns to sue, including Wang and an intern who took legal action against PBS’s “The Charlie Rose Show” in March.

As college students make the annual rite of passage from college classroom to summer internship, those unpaid positions may have finally peaked. Says Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation: “I think we may be at the very early stages of a significant backlash against an internship phenomenon that has gone off the rails.”

Internship or Internment?

The very first interns weren’t carrying luggage around New York City. Instead, they were anesthetizing, bloodletting and vaccinating. Between the mid-1800s and World War II, interns were only found in hospitals. Medicine was considered a unique field that could only be learned through observing and hands-on practice. Those internships are now the medical field’s modern-day residencies.

Around the 1930s, education and business leaders started advocating for a more seamless transition from school to the workplace in areas other than medicine. Internships began spreading into other fields, first in public administration and later publishing, marketing and banking.

As more internships sprouted across the country, Congress passed a number of laws regulating them, including the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1947, which specifically lays out a 6-point test, still in use today, for hiring unpaid interns. Under the Department of Labor’s test, an intern must be paid unless:

1. The internship is similar to training that would be given in an educational environment
2. The internship is for the benefit of the intern
3. The intern does not displace regular employees
4. The employer derives no immediate advantage from the intern
5. The intern is not entitled to a job at the end of the internship
6. The intern understands that he or she is not entitled to wages.

The real intern boom didn’t occur until the 1970s and 1980s. That’s when two big shifts occurred, says Perlin. The first was a move from the traditional norm of holding on to one job and working there your entire life to multiple forms of “contingent labor.” It’s what sociologist Andrew Ross has called the “casualization” of the U.S. labor force. Employers soon realized the benefits of part-time employees, independent contractors and temporary workers. By hiring contingent workers, employers could pay less in benefits, prevent workers’ attempts to unionize and initiate layoffs much more easily. That was coupled with the proliferation of Human Resource departments, which are now often solely responsible for hiring and bringing in new employees, many of whom often begin as interns through a company’s internship program.

Even before the financial collapse around 2007 and 2008, internships – both paid and unpaid – were increasing. The National Association of Colleges and Employers reported that 50% of college grads in 2008 had held an internship, compared with 17% in 1992. But the Great Recession accelerated that boom. Today, an estimated one-third to one-half of the 1.5 million internships in the U.S. are unpaid.

“More and more people after they graduate are feeling they have no choice but to take on unpaid internships,” says Perlin. “It’s something that you have to do three, four, five times potentially to break into an industry or to get any kind of paying work. It may even be something you do in your 30s or 40s.”

The Intern as Entry-Level Employee

No need to tell Eric Glatt that. Twenty years ago he began teaching English as a foreign language, then went back to school to get an MBA, which landed him a job with an insurance broker in Midtown Manhattan. But he always wanted to work in movies, so he started taking film classes at night and began working on a couple documentary projects – one paid, one unpaid. After a brief stint with insurance giant AIG and a run-in with the financial crisis, he thought he’d give the film thing one more shot.

At 40, Glatt was hired by Fox Searchlight as an unpaid intern on the set of the Oscar-nominated movie Black Swan. Because of his business background, Glatt was sent to the accounting department, where he carried around petty cash, filed receipts and made sure checks were signed. Initially, his job wasn’t labeled “intern.” It was “accounting clerk.”

During his internship, Glatt says he started doing some research about whether his internship was legal – and that got him thinking.

“I weighed my options for quite some time,” Glatt says. “I remember reading an article saying that unpaid internships were a lawsuit waiting to happen. I realized after a while, I’m that lawsuit.”

Fox Searchlight declined to comment on the specifics of Glatt’s allegations but issued a statement through a company representative: “It is clear that these are meritless claims aimed solely at getting press coverage for the litigants and their attorneys. Fox Searchlight internships comply with all federal and state laws and regulations, by paying required wages or complementing the individual’s academic studies in for-credit programs, while also providing them valuable ‘real world’ business experience. We look forward to aggressively fighting these groundless, opportunistic accusations.”

Fox and others seem to argue that they can get around not paying interns by offering college credit, but Glatt says he wasn’t enrolled in school at the time, and to the best of his knowledge, neither were any of the other dozen or so unpaid interns.

“They were counting on the fact that nobody would sue,” says Glatt, “particularly kids who are out of school. This culture of expecting to be able to get free labor if you slap the title intern on it has become so pervasive that people don’t question whether it’s ethically wrong or legally acceptable.”

The Influence of Occupy

Something else was happening when Glatt was considering legal action: Occupy Wall Street. The downward mobility of young people was part of the overall language of Occupy, and unpaid internships fit perfectly into that narrative.

“Unpaid internships have been talked about for the first time as a political issue in this country,” Perlin says. “There’s more awareness of the law, and these lawsuits are helping that.”

While intern lawsuits aren’t unprecedented – there was a prominent lawsuit against an Atlanta public relations firm in the 1990s – there have been next to none, likely because former interns are worried that they’ll be ostracized in an industry in which they’re trying to work. Besides, even a successful settlement isn’t going to get them much money.

“There’s still a big fear factor for interns about stepping forward and putting themselves on the line, risking potentially being blacklisted within an industry or within a firm,” Perlin says. “It’s a big thing to come out for not that much money. The back wages at stake are maybe several thousand dollars.”

Alex Footman, another former Fox Searchlight intern who filed the lawsuit along with Glatt, says he worries about how others in the film industry will treat him now.

“I realize that I have made a decision that could prevent me from being hired in the future,” Footman says.

After Wang heard about Glatt and Footman’s lawsuit, she was encouraged to take legal action against Hearst. Then in March, another intern sued, this time a 25-year-old film student named Lucy Bickerton, who interned at “The Charlie Rose Show.”

“It’s so ingrained, especially in the film industry, that you pay your dues,” Bickerton says.“You keep your mouth shut and are thankful for anything that comes your way.”

Bickerton says so many college students entering the workforce think internships will automatically lead to jobs. But nobody questions whether those interns should actually be getting wages.

“Nobody ever told me, ‘Don’t you think your time is worth getting paid for?” Bickerton says.

Yvette Vega, executive producer for “The Charlie Rose Show” also offered a statement refuting the accusations: “We are confident that our practices are in accordance with applicable law and provide a valuable education experience for interns.”

Before the trio of lawsuits, the Department of Labor announced that it was cracking down on unpaid internships by ramping up efforts to educate future interns about their rights and informing employers about federal law. But the best way for the department to take action is through complaints directly from interns — and that rarely happens.

But some employers have already started changing their internship policies, including magazine publisher Conde Nast, while others are beginning to rotate interns through different departments, which appears to offer them a more educational experience and makes it harder to assign menial but essential tasks. While it’s difficult to predict, the threat of legal action may mean fewer unpaid internships offered this summer than in recent memory.

For Wang, she says her internship at Harper’s Bazaar convinced her that rather than educating and training them, businesses will use interns any way they can simply to improve their bottom line.

“I always wanted to intern in New York in the fashion industry. But I had blown through all my savings to work for this major magazine so they could meet their budget,” says Wang. “That’s why I did what I did. I didn’t know another way to raise a flag about what was happening.”

A couple weeks ago, Wang was laid off from a new job at a web start-up. She’s moving back to Columbus.

A former city construction manager filed a whistleblower lawsuit Thursday accusing Pontiac of unlawful bidding practices, "insidious corruption, cronyism, and blatant disregard" for proper disposal of asbestos from demolition sites.

Edward Wenz of White Lake Township said he was hired in Pontiac in 2011 under a three-year contract to supervise demolition of abandoned and foreclosed properties.

His attorney, Robert Fetter, alleges Wenz was fired in February 2012 after he reported concerns to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provides federal funds for demolitions, and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.

The suit said Wenz reported to HUD "unlawful bidding practices for construction contracts for friends and political supporters of officials." The city, Emergency Manager Louis Schimmel, Richard Marsh and Wade Trim Associates are listed as defendants.

Marsh was Wenz's supervisor and is employed by Wade Trim, hired to oversee the city building department and the federal programs division.

"He (Wenz) was a temporary employee we had and were no longer in need of his services, (so) he was let go," said Schimmel.

Marsh, who is the federal programs administrator for Pontiac, declined to comment Thursday.

According to the lawsuit, Wenz allegedly overheard a contractor — previously banned by the city's law department from receiving work because of shoddy practices — yelling at a building department worker about not getting promised "help" in securing city jobs.

The next day, Wenz said Marsh reprimanded him. He was fired Feb. 3, the day he sent HUD a copy of a signed agreement with the contractor.

A lawsuit filed on behalf of former Westmont fire chief Frank Trout seeks an unspecified amount of money from the Village of Westmont for what Trout claims are unpaid wages dating back to 2004.

The lawsuit, which names Mayor Bill Rahn, Village Manager Ron Searl and the seven members of the village board as defendants, claims that Trout has not been paid for hours he worked as a duty officer for the Westmont Fire Department.

Duty officer is a second assignment that calls for a fire department employee or officer to always be on duty to supervise personnel. The lawsuit claims Trout was not compensated, as other department employees were, for an unspecified amount of hours he worked as duty Officer.

The lawsuit, filed in DuPage County Circuit Court on April 12, also seeks 2 percent interest for each month of Duty Officer work for which Trout was not compensated. The suit estimates that amount will exceed $50,000, in addition to attorney fees.

Trout retired from the Westmont Fire Department after 42 years of service in January, nearly a month after he was arrested on a drunken driving charge after hitting a parked car in unincorporated Westmont. In February, he was acquitted of the DUI charge.

The lawsuit also claims the Village of Westmont violated the Illinois Human Rights Act while investigating his DUI charge.

It states the “defendants failed to investigate the reliability or accuracy” of third-party statements and “failed to afford (Trout) an opportunity to refute said statements or provide an accurate rendition of the circumstances surrounding his arrest.”

Village officials declined to respond to the specific claims in the suit, but Westmont Village Manager Ron Searl they believe the lawsuit has no merit.

“We’re going to vigorously defend it,” Searl said.

Richard Blass, Trout’s attorney, said he could not specify the number of hours Trout worked for which he has not been compensated. Blass said the lawsuit includes a request of documents from the village, including timesheets, that would indicate the exact number of hours.

Trout kept his own record of his hours worked as a duty officer, according to the lawsuit.

Blass said Trout did not file any complaints with the village during the time he was not being compensated for hours worked as a duty officer.

“(Trout) is a lay person; he’s not an attorney. I wouldn’t expect him to know to do that,” he said. “He did keep his own log (of hours worked). We plan on comparing that with what the village gives us.”

The lawsuit alleges Trout’s compensation for hours worked as a duty officer stopped sometime in 2004, shortly after Searl was hired as village manager.

The lawsuit claims that after Searl was hired, Trout was informed by the village’s finance director that village officials “believed Chief Trout was making too much money by receiving wages when performing duties as a duty officer.” So Trout stopped submitting payroll requests for his work as duty officer because he was “concerned that he might lose his job as was the fate of many other department heads at the time,” the suit states.

Blass said now that the lawsuit has been filed, “the ball is in (the village’s) court.”

To view a copy of the lawsuit, click the PDF file to the right of this article.

As reports indicate drug maker Bayer has started settling some of the estimated 10,000 lawsuits filed over alleged side effects from its oral contraceptives Yaz and Yasmin, the FDA stepped in this month to order more protection for potential users of the drugs.

On April 10, 2012, the FDA announced it was requiring a label change for drugs such as Yaz which contain the chemical drospirenone, warning that the chemical may be associated with a higher risk for blood clots.

According to an April 13, 2012 Bloomberg article, Yaz is still the fourth most popular oral contraceptive, earning Bayer over $1.5 billion in 2010 with prescriptions to millions of women.

Several studies have indicated the blood clots associated with the drug may be linked to an increased risk of stroke, deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism injuries to the lungs.

In 2009, The British Medical Journal published research from Denmark and the Netherlands linking the chemical drospirenone in Yaz to an increased risk of blood clots, a contributing factor for stroke.

In October, 2011, the FDA released a study of more than 800,000 women taking oral contraceptives which showed that those taking drugs like Yaz had a 74% increased risk of developing blood clots.

A federal Multi-District Litigation court in Illinois set up to handle lawsuits filed over alleged Yaz side effects has reported more than 10,000 cases filed. The formal case is known as Yasmin and Yaz (Drospirenone) Marketing, Sales Practices and Products Liability Litigation (MDL No. 2100).

Bloomberg’s April 13, 2012 article also reported that the annual report released by Bayer on February 13, 2012 announced that the company has now settled at least 70 cases. No details or amounts of the settlements were given and the company has not admitted any fault.

According to the FDA warning, those taking Yaz are encouraged to talk with their physician before making any changes to their prescription.

Lawyers are still helping those who have suffered a side effect after taking Yaz learn about their legal rights. However, they caution that time may be limited. YazLawsuit.com contains more information on the lawyers currently settling Yaz lawsuits, FDA warnings and research related to the drug.

A group of Canadian women has filed a class action lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson alleging the company’s transvaginal mesh devices caused them to suffer serious, life-altering injuries. The transvaginal mesh lawsuit further alleges that Johnson & Johnson, along with its Ethicon, Inc. and Gynacare units, failed to adequately warn patients and physicians of the magnitude of the risk of serious side effects when using one of their transvaginal mesh products compared to alternative treatments.

Carol Kouyoumjian, one of the Canadian women involved in the lawsuit, recently told CTV.ca that she received a Johnson & Johnson transvaginal mesh device six years ago in order to treat stress urinary incontinence. The surgery did not cure her condition, but has left her with chronic leg pain.

“I woke up from surgery and the pain was absolutely unbelievable,” she said. “If the pain scale runs from 1-10, mine was a 12. My legs were literally vibrating.”

Kouyoumjian eventually lost her job as a nurse because she is no longer able to remain on her feet for hours at a time, CTV.ca reported. Her doctors have given her no choice but to live with her pain.

“I have been advised not to have it removed because over time, it becomes part of your body and that can cause many complications,” Kouyoumjian told CTV.com

Transvaginal Mesh Complications

Transvaginal mesh devices are used in the surgical treatment of pelvic organ prolapse (POP) and stress urinary incontinence (SUI). The devices are inserted transvaginally, and act as a hammock to support sagging pelvic organs and muscles. This past July, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) said in a Safety Communication that it had received 2,874 new reports of complications associated with transvaginal surgical mesh products like Gynecare Prolift from January 2008 through December 2010. Of these, 1,503 reports were associated with POP repairs and 1,371 associated with SUI repairs. Injuries attributed to the use of transvaginal mesh devices include

• Inflammation and infection 
• Pain from mesh shrinkage 
• Extrusion of mesh through the vaginal wall 
• Pain during intercourse and urination

According to the FDA, even when women undergo surgery, sometimes multiple surgeries, to have defective mesh removed, complications continue because it is almost always impossible to completely remove the device.

In the U.S., most of the transvaginal mesh devices currently on the market were cleared through the agency’s 510(k) fast-track approval process, which grants access to the market without much pre-market safety testing, based on the idea that the products were similar in design to a previously-approved device. However, the FDA is considering rescinding 510(k) approvals for transvaginal mesh devices used in POP repair, and has asked the makers of such devices to conduct safety studies of the products.

Johnson & Johnson Transvaginal Mesh Lawsuits

Johnson & Johnson now faces more than 550 U.S. lawsuits filed by women who allege they sustained serious injuries following surgery with the Gynecare Prolift vaginal mesh product to treat POP and SUI. Earlier it this year, it was learned that the Gynecare Prolift device was sold on the U.S. market for two years before Johnson & Johnson filed an application for its approval.

Lawsuits involving transvaginal mesh products made by Johnson & Johnson’s Ethicon and Gynecare units have been consolidated in a multidistrict litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of West Virginia. Three other transvaginal mesh litigations involving products made by American Medical Systems, C.R. Bard and Boston Scientific are also pending in the same jurisdiction.

The recession has certainly changed a lot of people's work schedules and work demands - so much so, more than 7,000 lawsuits were filed last year over unpaid overtime.

With that in mind, here are some of the rules for overtime, when you earn it and when you don't.

First, you have to know if you are an exempt or non-exempt employee.

Exempt employees can not earn overtime. They are employees designated as executive, administrative, or professional, outside sales employee, computer systems analysts, computer programmers, software engineers, and other similarly skilled computer employees.

Non-exempt employees do earn overtime, only if they make less than $455 per week.

And keep in mind, the U.S. government does not limit the number of hours an employee 16 and older can work.

The rate of overtime is quite familiar to most of us - one and one-half times an employee's regular rate of paid after 40 hours of work in a workweek.

You are not automatically paid overtime in the case that you work weekends, nights or holidays. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, that is up to the employer.

The "workweek" can be any seven consecutive days. It's not dependent on the calendar. But your employer can not average your hours over two weeks.

Each work week stands alone.

Your overtime check must be remitted to you on the day you're normally paid for the normal hours you worked.

And if your employer pays you a lump sum for overtime independent of the hours you actually worked, it does not cancel the employer's responsibility to pay you for each and every hour of overtime you paid.

It's important to note that there are exceptions to these rules. State and local government workers such as firefighters, law enforcement have different rules.

Air pollution from fracking includes the fumes breathed in by people nearby, as well as smog spread over a wide region and emissions of the greenhouse gas methane.

On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce the first national rules to reduce air pollution at hydraulically fractured - fracked - wells and some other oil and gas industry operations. The agency estimated that the plan it proposed in July would reduce smog-forming, cancer-causing and climate-altering pollutants from the natural gas industry by about one-fourth.

The White House in recent weeks has been reviewing the EPA plan to consider possible changes, the normal procedure for regulations. Industry groups have lobbied for exemptions that would reduce the impact of the rule, saying the original requirements are too costly. Environmental and health advocates have been talking to White House officials as well, opposing the industry's proposed changes.

The final version on Tuesday will show how President Barack Obama's administration navigates between the nation's needs for energy and health. Obama supports fracking because it yields vast amounts of natural gas, a fuel that burns cleaner than coal. He also has said that it should be done "without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk."

Pam Judy of Carmichaels, Pa.., says she fears that her family already is at risk from fumes from a large natural gas compressor station 780 feet from their home in the hills. When they built it, they were far from everything. Three years later, a natural gas compressor station was built on neighboring property.

"We have fumes that are in our yard almost constantly," she said. "There are times when it smells like diesel or a kerosene smell. It's very difficult to pinpoint the exact smell. Then there are times we get a smell like chlorine. When we get that chlorine smell it literally will scorch your eyes and your throat."

Air tests found 16 chemicals in her yard, including benzene, a chemical the EPA classifies as a carcinogen. She said test of her blood also showed exposure to benzene and other chemicals. Benzene can cause dizziness and headaches, symptoms she's had. Her adult children have had runny noses, headaches and sore throats that go away when they aren't at their parents' home.

The family worries about long-term exposure and is wrestling with whether to stay. Their land was handed down in her family since her great-grandparents' day, Judy said. "It's really heart-wrenching for us to make the decision to move."

Paul Parker, a retired vice president of an engineering company who worked with energy companies, has lived for 36 years in an area south of Pittsburgh where natural gas development has sprung up in the last few years. Parker said no to leases on his own property, but sees the development around him and says the area has been ruined.

"When you go outside, it's like living in a chemical complex," he said. Pollution comes from vents on storage tanks near his property, he said, as well as nearby flaring to burn gas in early stages of well development and the diesel emissions of hundreds of trucks needed to haul water and equipment to well sites.

Fracking involves pumping water, sand and chemicals deep underground to release gas. After the injection, the fracking fluids and gas flow back for a period of several days or more.

The EPA's rule would require companies to use portable equipment to capture this gas that otherwise escapes to the atmosphere or gets burned off in flares, a process known as green completion. The equipment would reduce volatile organic compounds, which are part of what forms smog. The same equipment would capture methane, the primary constituent of natural gas, and make it available for sale.

The industry estimates that more than 25,000 wells are fractured or refractured each year.

The American Petroleum Institute, the lobby for the oil and gas industry, has asked the Obama administration to make the requirement apply only to wells where the gas stream is 10 percent or more of volatile organic compounds.

That approach would exclude many wells.

The EPA's existing rule for volatile organic compounds in the gas industry was issued in 1985 and applied only to leak detection at new and upgraded gas processing plants. That arrangement leaves much of the volatile organic-compound emissions from the oil and gas industry unregulated.

API told the EPA earlier that the average well is 2.95 percent volatile organic compounds. API spokesman Carlton Carroll said on Friday that API had to correct that number because it was wrong. "We believe the average is closer to 10 percent," he said.

API president and CEO Jack Gerard said in a letter three weeks ago to senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett that emissions controls on low volatile organic-compound gas would not be cost-effective. He also asked for other changes, including at least two years for building the equipment needed for green completions.

Environmental groups oppose those requests. They say that even small percentages of volatile organic compounds add up, because the volumes in fracking are so large. They also say that the industry over-estimated the costs of green completions, and they point out that in states such as Colorado and Wyoming, where the equipment is already required, the gas industry has continued to grow.

Other parts of the EPA's plan would require equipment on compressors, storage tanks and new pneumatic controllers, the instruments that control pressure and other conditions.

"This industry produces an astonishing amount of air pollutions," and the emissions have been largely ignored, said Joe Osborne, legal director of the Group Against Smog and Pollution.

Some pollutants on a local level can mean greater risks for cancer and neurological and reproductive problems, Osborne said. Other pollutants combine to form smog, which spreads over a much wider area. Smog can make it hard to breathe, aggravate asthma and other lung diseases and permanently damage lungs

In Pennsylvania, where GASP is based, parts of the state, along with much of the rest of the Eastern U.S., already don't meet health standards for smog. The good news is that smog levels have gone down in the past 20 years, Osborne said. But the development of shale gas "has the potential to halt that progress or potentially even reverse it."

A group of Pepsi Bottling Group Inc. employees will receive $187,275 as part of a settlement in a collective action over unpaid overtime compensation.

Pepsi will also pay administrative costs and attorneys’ fees that bring the total above $270,000, according to court documents.

Avary Leigh was the class representative of a group of about 60 employees who worked at six Pepsi Bottling Group locations who said they had not been paid for overtime hours over the past three years.

The case was filed in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt because Leigh worked as a sales representative in the Capitol Heights location.

The complaint stated that, from Sept. 15, 2008 to Dec. 8, 2009, Leigh had a vacation-relief position. That meant he delivered Pepsi products to stores and would cover the other sales representatives’ routes while they were on vacation.

The complaint stated Leigh “performed work ‘off-the-clock’ after his shift and after he clocked out from his shift at the behest and direction of his supervisor.”

Leigh’s attorney, Alan Crone of Crone & McEvoy PLC in Memphis, said the workers he represented experienced similar treatment at Pepsi Bottling Group centers in Capitol Heights, New England, Minnesota, Michigan, upstate New York and Western Pennsylvania.

“They were happy with the settlement,” Crone said.

Pepsi Bottling Group’s attorney, Samantha Hardy at Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP in San Diego, did not return calls for comment.

The settlement includes $187,275 in payments to the plaintiffs, a $9,000 incentive fee to Leigh, $15,000 in claims administration fees, $3,651 in costs and $64,273 in attorneys’ fees.

U.S. District Judge Deborah K. Chasanow approved the settlement order on Feb. 27.

It was supposed to be a routine trip to the doctor for 83-year-old Bernice Martens. But in the parking lot of the medical center, a caretaker dropped Martens while trying to lift her from the car to her wheelchair. It happened a second time when the caretaker tried to lift her client back into the car.

Less than two weeks later, Martens was dead.

Her caretaker, it was discovered later, wasn't qualified to work directly with clients -- something her employer, Senior Helpers in Bloomington, didn't know because the company didn't do a background check until after firing her.

An investigation by the Minnesota Department of Health into the incident last October found negligence on the part of both the employee and Senior Helpers, and identified three violations of state statute. The employee, who wasn't named, denied to investigators that she dropped Martens and said she thought she used transfer belts, but wasn't sure. The employee was fired two days after the incident.

"We want to extend our sincerest apologies to the family," Senior Helpers owner Mike Johnson said in a statement. "This is an isolated incident and we have a well established reputation of excellence serving this community. We thoroughly trained our caregiver and unfortunately this person did not follow procedure."

It's the only substantiated complaint against Senior Helpers filed with the Minnesota Department of Health since 2008. The company, which operates nationwide, hires caregivers to work with seniors like Martens who lived on their own.

For Martens' family, the findings come too late. The mishandling of Martens by her caretaker contributed to her rapid decline in health and ultimately her death, the family's attorney Mark Niemeyer said.

"She was in very good health," he said. After falling, "she declined in a matter of days."

The family will try to settle with the company out of court, but is prepared to sue, he said.

Only weeks before her death, Martens, 83, had moved from Illinois to an Eden Prairie senior apartment to be closer to her son, Scott Martens, and his family. They hired Senior Helpers caretakers to get Martens to appointments.

On Oct. 25, 2011, Martens' daughter-in-law went with her to an appointment. According to the state report, the Senior Helpers employee arrived to pick her up, but had to get help lifting Martens from her wheelchair to the car. When they got to the appointment, the caretaker attempted to move Martens from the car to the wheelchair and dropped her on the ground. Medical center staff had to help get Martens into a wheelchair. The daughter-in-law reported the incident to Senior Helpers, but after the appointment, the employee dropped Martens a second time trying to lift her into the car.

The caretaker didn't use a transfer belt in any of the three cases, even though Martens' care plan called for it, the report said.

That night, Martens complained of pain to a different caretaker, who noted a "very large" bruise from her waist to arm pit, 6 inches wide. It wasn't reported to a nurse, according to the state.

Two days later, Martens told a staff member she was "in pain all the time" after the two falls. The following day, she was admitted to a hospital with a massive hematoma. She died there a week later, her death certificate citing "aspiration pneumonitis."

A background study is required of staff before direct contact in facilities licensed by the Department of Human Services. But Senior Helpers didn't submit one for Martens' caretaker until the day after firing her.

"Had [Senior Helpers] conducted the background study prior to the [employee] providing services as required by statute," the state report said, "[Senior Helpers] would have been notified that the [employee] could not provide direct contact with clients."

The state faulted Senior Helpers for failing to follow Martens' care plan, conduct a background study or report the maltreatment to a nurse. It is now in compliance, said Stella French, director of the Office of Health Facility Complaints.

Neglecting to complete background studies on employees is rare, she said, but incidents involving transferring a patient from one place to another are "very common, unfortunately."