Reach Wireline, LLC | Salaried Field Engineers | Carrizo Springs & Cotulla, Texas

Oilfield wireline work is physical labor performed outdoors at remote well sites. In the casedhole wireline and perforating business, field crews arm explosive perforating guns, assemble heavy tool strings, run them thousands of feet down a well, detonate the charges, and pull the equipment back out, over and over across shifts that can run fifteen hours or more. Some of the workers who do this labor are paid by the hour and receive overtime. Others are given a salary, a job title, and no overtime at all, even when they perform the same manual work on the same crews and work the same long days.

The Buenker Law Firm and Welmaker Law, PLLC filed a federal overtime lawsuit against Reach Wireline, LLC, an oilfield services company that provides casedhole wireline and completions services to operators at well sites in Texas. The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, San Antonio Division, on behalf of a field engineer who worked for Reach at well sites in South Texas, in and around Carrizo Springs and Cotulla. According to the complaint, Reach paid its field engineers a flat annual salary and no overtime premium, no matter how many hours they worked. The complaint alleges that the plaintiff typically worked a hitch schedule of about fourteen days on followed by seven days off, that he often worked through his scheduled days off, and that during his hitches he sometimes worked one hundred or more hours in a single week without any overtime pay.

Federal law requires most employees to receive one and one-half times their regular rate of pay for every hour worked over forty in a workweek. An employer that wants to avoid paying overtime must prove that a specific exemption applies. The exemptions for executive, administrative, and professional employees do not reach manual laborers or other blue collar workers who perform repetitive work with their hands, physical skill, and energy, no matter how highly paid they are. 29 C.F.R. § 541.3(a). The regulation that allows an employer to treat very high earners as exempt likewise does not apply to workers whose primary duty is manual or physical labor. 29 C.F.R. § 541.601(d). A worker does not become exempt simply because the employer attaches a salary and an office-sounding title to physical field work.

The lawsuit was filed as a collective action on behalf of all field engineers, however titled, who were paid a salary by Reach Wireline and were not paid overtime for hours worked over forty in a workweek, during the three-year period before the complaint was filed. The complaint alleges that Reach employed at least twelve salaried field engineers in the plaintiff’s district and additional salaried field engineers in at least one other district in West Texas, and that these workers can be identified from Reach’s own payroll and personnel records. This case is currently pending in federal court in San Antonio.

According to the complaint, Reach paid the hourly operators who worked next to the field engineers, on the same crews and at the same well sites, an overtime premium for their overtime hours, while it classified the field engineers as exempt and paid them nothing extra for the same hours. The lawsuit alleges that Reach knew the overtime laws applied to the crews on its well sites and that it acted knowingly, willfully, or with reckless disregard of the law. These are allegations, and Reach has not yet responded to them in court.