Last week, I published an article detailing a U.S. Department of Labor investigation into Alliance RV. In summary, the DOL found that over two years Alliance failed to pay the proper overtime wages for piece-rate employees. Accounted for was $1.2 million.
At the time of posting, Alliance RV had not yet commented to any media outlets on the situation. Earlier this week, however, Co-Founder and President of Alliance RV, Coley Brady, reached out to me. He wanted to offer an official company comment on the investigation. To accurately represent Alliance’s side of the story, this article will detail those words.
Alliance RV’s official company comment
Coley Brady’s comment read as follows:
Our employees are our greatest resource, and while establishing our compensation model during inception, we undertook an analysis to ensure that the complex piece rate calculation utilized to pay our employees was compliant with the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Unfortunately, despite our analysis, there was an unintentional misapplication of a certain aspect of the overtime calculation. Upon discovering the error, we immediately reevaluated our piece-rate model to ensure it adhered to all aspects of the Fair Labor Standards Act and regulations. The new model was implemented as soon as it was further vetted and deemed compliant. The Company then began the process to determine what was owed to our employees based upon the compliant compensation model.
After the compensation model had been corrected, while we were making the calculations of amounts owed, the Department of Labor (DOL) contacted us regarding our overtime calculations. The Company cooperated with the DOL fully, and advised that it was already in the process of addressing the issue. Upon finishing our assessment of any amounts owed, we shared the information with the DOL and worked with the agency to pay the affected employees.
This was an unfortunate and unintentional error that was rectified early in 2022 and we consider it a closed matter.
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While I’m as skeptical as they come, the thing that has me believe the Alliance response, and something I wondered about from the original article, was why there was no fine or penalty on the company from the DOL. Had the DOL come in and uncovered the issue I can’t imagine a no penalty result. But I can surely understand it if the DOL came in and the error was already caught and in the process of being fixed.
Glad to hear Alliance RV found their error and were beginning to correct the problem, before the DOL knocked on their door. Proceedings will go much better for Alliance RV. With that said, kudos to RVTravel to be trusted to publish verbatim. Also says a lot about our traditional media, and trust.
Previous to my retirement I worked in senior management for a corporation in a different industry. We had a very similar payroll calculation error that took us completely by surprise when it came to light. There was no intent to underpay anyone, in fact quite the opposite was true. There was no malice, no greed and no coverup, just a very embarrassed management team that corrected the problem immediately. Such unintentional mistakes do happen. Let’s give Alliance RV the benefit of the doubt and thank them for making it right.
Is it just me or does 1.2 million dollars seem like a long time to not correct it? And saying you were correcting it coincidentally when the DOL shows up? Maybe just bad timing? Maybe they got a tip that DOL was investigating?
All leaders (and followers) make mistakes. Good leaders verify and correct.
Coley Brady and team showed good leadership.
Stay safe – and look in the mirror.
Joe
“Old man yells at cloud” meme is appropriate here…
Glad to learn that it truly was an “honest” mistake, given the company’s behavior after the error was discovered.
Still doesn’t explain why they chose “piece work” over, oh I don’t know… a decent salary with real benefits!
Sorry, lame excuses just don’t cut it.
The piece rate pay model is the industry standard in Elkhart RV production. I’m sure they chose it because if you don’t, you don’t get a workforce in that area. Got me thinking though so I looked at a production job listed on their website and wanted to see what benefits they do offer and it looked pretty good, they even do a 401K match, which is rare. Just saying, maybe they should get the benefit of the doubt here as I’m sure they could have just let this die at no comment.
Kind of like covering the poop in the corner with a paper towel.
Basically sounds like” well, we tried to use a piece work scheme to get around overtime regulations. We cut it to close to the bone & got caught.”
Yep got caught with the “hand in the cookie jar” and trying to get it out. Sorry but company executives have almost as much credibility as politicians. They’re just out of the lime light.
You’re both spot on! It’s damage control.
The old saying is “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission”. Another old saying is ” if it doesn’t look or sound right don’t do it”. I guess the cookie jar was just too tempting not to try it. A trip to the wood shed in the form of high fines on top of restitution should do it.
Yeah, I’m not buying the statement that they were in the process of reevaluation when the DOL called. Good to see that there are government agencies out there doing their jobs.
Seems like most readers on this site promote less government. How do we justify this government intervention?
I’m sure the workers that were shorted on their paychecks could justify the government intervention.
Les, I agree with you. Use the gov’t when they are handing out money to you, but complain about the gov’t when they hand it to someone else.
I guess I will have to re-read the original article. I don’t recall that piece work was used to get around anything like that. A lot of industries use piece work and a lot of employees like it. It wouldn’t be strange for a gov’t agency, while working with an employer to straighten something out, to leak a story to the newspaper to make them look good and give the newspaper a headline for readership. We don’t believe the news media and don’t trust the gov’t and all of a sudden we are on their side?
The issue was resolved the first of the year, and the gov’t agency published a NEWS release at the end of the year? Who do you think was playing games?