On October 13, 2026, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit revived a putative collective and class action alleging that discount supermarket chain Lidl failed to pay grocery workers for time spent waiting outside locked stores for a manager to let them in. The decision in Santos v. Lidl
Well, that’s that.
The U.S. Department of Labor has issued a final rule, scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on May 15, 2026, formally removing the regulatory text from the now-vacated 2024 overtime rule and restoring the Part 541 regulations as they existed before that rule took effect.
As we previously reported
On May 4, 2026, the Second Circuit joined the Third, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits in holding that a district court may not authorize notice to out-of-state potential opt-in plaintiffs in an FLSA collective action unless the court has personal jurisdiction over the defendant with respect to those workers’ claims.
The Fair Labor Standards Act was one of the earliest American workplace laws to contain an explicit anti-retaliation provision. Modeled after the anti-retaliation provisions in other New Deal legislation, including the National Labor Relations Act enacted just three years prior, the FLSA’s original text in 1938 made it unlawful “for any person … to discharge