Mount Airy Casino Resort has agreed to pay $2.3 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that could affect almost 700 current and former employees eligible for unpaid wages and overtime.
The employees are entitled to at least $1,474,000 of the money, with the rest going toward lawyers’ fees, litigation expenses and settlement administration, according to a copy of the settlement filed in federal court.
Under the settlement, first proposed in September, the employees will get paid an average of more than $2,000, with no employee receiving less than $100, according to the settlement. The eligible must have worked at Mount Airy between Feb. 7, 2022, and May 8, 2025.
U.S. District Judge Joseph F. Saporito Jr. scheduled a hearing for Feb. 19 on final approval of the settlement but gave employees time to opt out of it.
Ex-table game dealers filed suit
The suit was filed in February by former Mount Airy table games (blackjack, roulette, craps) dealers Jennifer Mak of Cresco and William Neidig of Whitehall, who both relied on tips and wages.
They proposed creating a class action, which means any result would affect any employee in similar situations. The suit estimated that at least 100 people were affected, with potential payouts of more than $5 million. By the time settlement negotiations began, more than 150 had joined the suit. After negotiations with casino lawyers, up to 696 are eligible for part of the settlement.
Efforts to obtain comment from casino officials, Mount Airy's lawyers, Donald D. Gamburg and Lee E. Tankle, of the law firm, Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, and Mak and Neidig’s lawyers were unsuccessful.
Suit accuses casino of breaking labor laws
The suit accused the casino of:
- Paying a sub-minimum wage without letting employees know the casino would take a tip credit that covered the gap between the sub-minimum wage and the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Under federal law, the sub-minimum case wage must be at least $2.13 an hour. If tips don’t cover the difference, an employer must pay the difference, according to federal law. “The failure to give tip credit notice gives rise to both unpaid minimum wages and overtime wages,” the suit said.
- Required dealers to pool tips and distribute them to other dealers who rightly earned the tips, but also to cover the paid time off of non-tipped management and supervisory employees who sometimes doubled as dealers. Supervisors are paid far higher hourly wages.
The tip credit applies only to the hours they worked as dealers. - Using a time clock rounding policy that failed to properly compensate employees for all time worked, “resulting in minimum wage and overtime violations.”
The casino required employees to clock in no earlier than seven minutes before their shifts started and no later than seven minutes after their shifts ended. Rounding means the shift is recorded as starting at the employee’s start time and ends before rounding up to the next 150-minute interval, routinely costing them seven minutes of pay, according to the suit.
“Defendant has no good faith basis to use such a rigged rounding system as its time clocks record the actual clock in and clock out times to at least a one-minute accuracy,” the suit says. - Miscalculating employees’ regular rate of pay for overtime purposes, which led to unpaid overtime.
“Defendant’s systemic violation of federal and state wage laws was willful,” lawyers wrote in the suit.
The suit says the practices filed the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and the state Wage Payment and Collection Law and the Minimum Wage Act.
