That's because the titles bestowed by employers do not determine an employee's entitlement to overtime. Rather, an employee's actual duties, rather than their job title, controls in the analysis of whether they are exempt or non-exempt from overtime. Thus, even those employees with impressive titles who are working for prominent companies may be entitled to overtime for the long hours they put in performing primarily clerical, routine and even physical duties.

In a federal overtime lawsuit brought pursuant to the Fair Labor Standards Act ("FLSA"), a New York district court judge recently conditionally certified a class of Audit Associates working at KPMG's offices in the United States. Pippins et al. v. KPMG LLP, case number 1:11-cv-00377, Southern District of New York. As noted by Gregg Shavitz of the Shavitz Law Group, who along with the law office of Outten & Golden represents the plaintiffs in Pippins, "while the court did not rule upon the ultimate issue of whether the Audit Associates' actual duties deemed them non-exempt, it did rule that the Audit Associates were sufficiently similar to justify collective treatment under the FLSA, which means notice will be provided to all KPMG Audit Associates across the U.S. within the 3 year statute of limitations advising that they are eligible to participate in the lawsuit." This is particularly significant in a case with a defendant as large as KPMG, which has over 80 offices and 23,000 employees in the United States. If the plaintiff action is successful, all such Audit Associates will be eligible for overtime wages.

In its ruling, the Pippins court found that the Audit Associates satisfied the FLSA's "similarly situated standard for conditional certification" in that all were subject to the same policies and procedures regarding the performance of their duties, received the same training, and operated under the same job description and protocols. In addition, the Audit Associates all were subject to the same strict professional and regulatory rules and standards. Given these similarities, the court found it would be "shocking" not to find that the Audit Associates met the lenient threshold for certification of an FLSA collective action.

This ruling, and others like it, has wide-ranging ramifications for employees who believe they have been misclassified as exempt from the overtime provisions of the FLSA. Misclassification of employees occurs across a broad spectrum of workers and industries. Because of the nature of the FLSA exemptions, many white-collar workers - including workers in banking, finance, accounting and other related fields - often find themselves misclassified because their glorified job titles do not reflect the reality of actual duties they perform in these positions every day. The economic incentive to misclassify employees cannot be understated: misclassified employees receive no wages whatsoever for their overtime hours work, thereby resulting in an enormous economic windfall to employers in overtime wages not paid.

Therefore, if your actual job duties do not involve significant judgment and discretion, but rather are routine or controlled in almost every respect by your superiors and/or corporate policies and procedures, then an employee may have been misclassified as exempt and entitled to overtime wages. "Workers who have worked more than 40 hours for an employer within one or more work weeks within the past three years but did not receive time-and-a-half wages for those overtime hours because they were classified as exempt, may have been misclassified and may be owed overtime wages plus other penalties from the employer," says Gregg Shavitz.

Such misclassified employees are likely not alone and the other similarly situated employees may have the opportunity to seek a potential class-wide remedy under the FLSA.

For more information about misclassification and workers' rights, the Shavitz Law Group created the website www.HelpingWorkers.com.