Employment: Employee isn’t entitled to FLSA’s three-year statute of limitations

Where an amended complaint failed to plead that an employer’s violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act was willful, the employee was not entitled to the longer three-year statute of limitations.

Background

Caesars Virginia LLC has moved to dismiss the Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA, and the Virginia Wage Payment Act, or VWPA, claims in Levar Fowler’s amended complaint.

FLSA

The parties do not dispute that, because Fowler did not add his FLSA claim until he filed the amended complaint on Aug. 13, 2025, that claim is time-barred under the standard two-year statute of limitations. Rather, the parties dispute whether Fowler’s allegations adequately alleged a willful violation the FLSA so as to entitle him to the three-year standard of limitations for willful violations of the FLSA.

At the outset, Fowler’s factual allegations are sufficient to state a plausible claim that Caesars violated the FLSA by undercompensating him for his overtime rate. But Fowler’s assertions in his amended complaint and the attached exhibits fail to raise, either expressly or inferentially, a plausible allegation of Caesars’s willfulness.

In addition to failing to allege in plain terms that Caesars’s alleged FLSA violation was willful, Fowler’s amended complaint does not characterize the alleged violation as purposeful, intentional, or deliberate, or make any other allegations that would indicate that Fowler “generally averred willfulness.”

Courts in this circuit look to the complaint’s language to determine whether the plaintiff plausibly alleged willfulness. Fowler’s allegations also don’t permit the court to infer that Caesars knew or recklessly disregarded that its practices violated the FLSA. Though Fowler did not need to allege specific facts at this stage, his failure to aver Caesars’s willfulness or recklessness generally required him to provide some kind of factual support.

In some cases, allegations that the defendants had complete control over the corporate structure of the company and the plaintiffs’ schedules were sufficient to support a reasonable inference that the purported FLSA violations were willful. Crucially, however, in those cases, the plaintiffs alleged that the defendants failed to pay them any overtime at all and, in particular, that the defendants withheld overtime pay by misclassifying the plaintiffs as exempt, by not recording all compensable hours or by falsifying hours on paystubs and requiring plaintiffs to waive their right to the overtime premium.

In situations where a plaintiff claims that a company knows that its employees are working overtime but fails to pay any overtime—and further, takes steps like those described above to deny that pay—“[t]hat allegation necessarily requires an element of willfulness on the part of the employer and is thus sufficient at the motion to dismiss stage to allege a willful violation[.]”

The facts of the cases described above differ substantively from the facts Fowler alleges—that Caesars paid him overtime but failed to incorporate his sign-on bonus into the rate. It is fundamentally different to allege that an employer was aware that an employee worked overtime but failed to pay them—a case in which willfulness is properly inferred—and what Fowler asserts here—that Caesars paid him overtime but based on an allegedly incorrect rate of pay.

Whereas the former scenario requires, almost as a matter of common sense, some degree of willfulness (or, at a minimum, recklessness), the latter does not. Fowler fails to include in his amended complaint any reference to willful or reckless conduct on Caesars’s part, and the facts pleaded are not sufficient to infer as much. The exhibits attached to the amended complaint, although providing that Fowler received the repayable sign-on bonus and that Caesars did not incorporate it into his overtime rate, likewise fall well short of implying willfulness or recklessness on Caesars’s part.

Because Fowler’s individual FLSA claim is time-barred, his collective action claim on behalf of similarly situated class members must be dismissed. Without a justiciable action as to Fowler individually, his purported collective action under the FLSA fails. Accordingly, the court will dismiss Count Six.

VWPA

Fowler’s claim under the VWPA is inextricably tied to Fowler’s FLSA claim, as both claims arise under the same facts. Like Fowler’s FLSA claim, his Rule 23 class action claim under the VWPA must also be dismissed. Accordingly, the court will dismiss Count Seven.

Defendant’s partial motion to dismiss amended complaint granted.

Fowler v. Caesars Virginia LLC, Case No. 4:24-cv-00029, Oct. 28, 2025. WDVA at Danville (Cullen). VLW 025-3-446. 13 pp.