Matt Rigling – Page 2 – Economic Thinking In Action

EmployStats at the Upcoming NELA Spring Seminar

EmployStats is honored to be attending and speaking at the upcoming National Employment Lawyers Association (NELA) Spring Seminar. The seminar, titled Epic Advocacy: Protecting Wages in Litigation & Arbitration will take place in Denver, CO on April 12-13, 2019.

EmployStats’ principal economist Dwight Steward, Ph.D., and Matt Rigling, MA, will be presenting alongside attorneys Michael A. Hodgson and Dan Getman. The speaker’s session, Calculating Damages: Views from an Expert and Lawyers, will discuss all relevant aspects of calculating and proving liability and damages in wage and hour cases.

The panelists will present the options attorneys face when attempting to tabulate damages, discuss the best practices for obtaining and analyzing data, as well as discuss common wage and hour issues such as sampling and surveys. EmployStats’ statistical experts will also provide statistical background as they relate to labor and employment class action lawsuits, such as a explaining statistical significance, confidence intervals, stratified sampling, and margin of error.

We hope to see you at the upcoming NELA Spring Seminar in Denver on April 13, we would love to meet and discuss how EmployStats can assist you with your wage and hour lawsuit. To find out more about the seminar, please visit the NELA Website. For more on EmployStats, visit the EmployStats Website.

Changes to Texas Workforce Commission Data

The Texas Workforce Commission (“TWC”) recently announced they are no longer going to utilize their TRACER 2 application to provide information regarding the Texas labor market. For many years, the data scientists at EmployStats and other firms in Texas researched economic indicators such as employment statistics, salary and wages, and job growth using the inquiry capabilities of the TRACER 2 application.

The TWC is the state agency responsible for managing and providing workforce development services to employers and potential employees in Texas. One of the many service the TWC provides is the access for job seekers and data scientists to reliable labor and employment statistics relevant to occupations and industries within the state of Texas. Specifically, TWC’s TRACER 2 program provided search functions which allowed individuals to freely tabulate market trends and statistics such as employment/unemployment estimates, industry and occupational projections, and occupational wage data within Texas.

With the TWC’s TRACER 2 application “out to pasture” as the TWC puts it, data can now be accessed using a combination of other TWC databases, as well as United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (“BLS”) data such as the Local Area Unemployment Statistics (“LAUS”) and the Current Employment Statistics (“CES”).

Case Update: Travel Time Analyses

A common allegation in wage and hour lawsuits is off-the-clock work. In these types of cases, employees usually allege that they performed work, such as travel between job sites, that they were not paid for performing. Other common off-the-clock-work allegations typically involve activities such as spending time in security checkpoints, putting on a uniform, preparing for work, and logging onto computer systems.

Recently, the EmployStats Wage and Hour Consulting team completed work on a case where Plaintiffs alleged unpaid off-the-clock work for time spent driving from their homes to their job sites, as well as travel time between job sites. In this case, EmployStats was able to analyze and assess Plaintiffs’ allegations by combining and creating datasets of personnel and job location data, and using mapping programs to calculate the time Plaintiffs could have potentially spent traveling and performing off-the-clock work.

The following is an example of how the EmployStats Wage and Hour Consulting team typically handles a case involving travel time:

First, the Employstats team works to combine and merge multiple databases containing employee home locations, employee time and payroll records, and job site locations into a single analyzable database.
The EmployStats team then uses mapping platforms, such as Google Maps API or Mapquest API, to calculate the distance in miles and/or travel time in hours for each unique trip.
Finally, the EmployStats team uses the employee time and payroll records to assess any potential damages due to travel time off-the-clock work.

Check out the EmployStats website to see how we can help you with your wage and hour cases!

Case Update: Time Clock Rounding Analyses

The EmployStats Wage & Hour Consulting Team recently completed work on a case in the state of New York where the Plaintiff’s alleged unpaid straight time and overtime compensation due to the Defendant’s timekeeping policies.

In this case as well as others that EmployStats has worked in the past, the Plaintiff’s alleged that the Defendant’s had a timekeeping policy which systematically understated the employee’s time worked in a given pay period. In practice, some time clock rounding policies may be neutral in principle, but non-neutral in practice. For any number of reasons, the employee or the employer may benefit more often than not from a seemingly neutral rounding policy.

The analysis that we perform typically involves manipulating, matching and analyzing big data from inherently incompatible time and payroll databases. In addition to analyzing the alleged straight time and overtime compensation owed to employees, EmployStats also assists attorneys in the calculation of penalties.

In states such as California and New York, there are penalties for noncompliance with the labor codes. We work with attorneys to calculate the appropriate penalties and interest in the lawsuit or investigation. The EmployStats Wage & Hour Consulting Team is proficient at providing calculations and tabulations that are insightful and well documented.

Upcoming Changes to Census Data

The United States Census Bureau announced on September 2018 that their privacy policy regarding the 2020 Census Survey and other public use data projects will be undergoing changes, some of which could have an impact on many areas of data science.

According to a December 2018 report written by the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation (ISRDI), University of Minnesota, the US Census Bureau’s new set of standards and methods for disclosure, known as differential privacy, may make it impossible to access usable microdata and severely limit access to other important public use data.

Data scientists, including those at EmployStats, have been regularly utilizing free reliable public Census Bureau data to analyze social and economic factors across America for over six decades. The US Census Bureau releases public microdata such as the Decennial Census and the American Community Survey, which collects information on demographics, employment, income, household characteristics, and other social and economic factors. EmployStats uses this data regularly to assist clients in Labor and Employment cases.

The ISRDI report can be found here.

To find out more about how EmployStats can assist you with your Labor and Employment case, please visit www.EmployStats.com and make sure to follow us on Twitter @employstatsnews

Case Update: Employee Misclassification

The EmployStats consulting team, lead by Matt Rigling, MA, recently worked on a case involving employee misclassification. EmployStats assisted attorneys by calculating potential damages for employees who were classified as exempt but potentially should have been classified as non-exempt and therefore owed FLSA overtime wages for hours worked over 40 in a workweek.

Matt Rigling and the EmployStats team also worked to use the case data and information provided to confirm whether the employees in question passed both the salary and duties tests for exemption purposes. According to the FLSA, an employee can be classified as exempt under the Administrative, Executive, or Professional exemption if they meet all of the requirements for salary and job duties.

In this case, EmployStats compared the employee information to the salary and job duty requirements of the Administrative and Executive exemptions. Under both exemptions, the employee must be paid a salary of at least $455, as well as meet the job duties specific to an Administrative or Executive employee. According to U.S. Department of Labor, Administrative employee’s primary job duty must be office work that is “directly related to the management or general business operations of the employer or employer’s customers” and must include “the exercise of discretion and independent judgement” for matters of importance. Similarly, Executive employee’s primary job duty has to be managing the company, or a department of the company. Additionally, they must also regularly direct at least two other full-time employees and have the authority to at least recommend the company fire, hire, or promote other employees.

To see how EmployStats can assist you with an employee misclassification case or another labor and employment matter, please visit www.EmployStats.com or give us a call at 512-476-3711. Also make sure to follow our blog and find us on social media! @employstatsnews

EmployStats is Expanding

The EmployStats team is thrilled to announce a new division of expertise that we can now provide to our clients.

Starting in January 2019, the new Wage and Hour Data consulting division began operation under the leadership of Consultant Matt Rigling. Matt Rigling obtained his Master’s of Arts in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin, and has been providing EmployStats’ clients with database and data analytics consulting for the past three years. Under this new division of EmployStats, the team will strive to provide our wage and hour clients with the expertise they need in the construction and tabulation of time and pay record databases, as well as providing wage and hour penalty calculations for our clients in states such as California and New York.

This type of consultation is perfect for both plaintiff and defense attorneys seeking to have the best support for their client in order to efficiently reach a settlement at mediation, as well as both private and government entities simply seeking to perform internal audits of their labor practices. EmployStats has the capability to swiftly handle large and cumbersome data sets that can sometimes bog down attorneys and paralegals attempting to handle the analysis in-house.

Follow this blog as we continue to post about tips for efficiently using data to bring your wage and hour cases to settlement, updates on upcoming events, and current events in the world of labor and employment law. For more information on Matt Rigling and the EmployStats team, please check us out on our website and social media accounts!

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What is included in a Data Management Plan?

All data projects can benefit from building a Data Management Plan (“DMP”) before the project begins. Typically a DMP is a formal document that describes your data and what your team will do with it during and after the data project.

There is no cookie-cutter DMP that is right for every project, but in most cases the following questions should be addressed in your DMP:

What kind of data will your project analyze? What file formats and software packages will you use? What will your data output be? How will you collect and process the data?
How will you document and organize your data? What metadata will you collect? What standards and formats will you use?
What are your plans for data access within your team? What are the roles that the individuals in your team will play in the data analysis process? How will you address any privacy or ethical issues, if applicable?
What are your plans for long term archiving? What file formats will you archive the data in? Who will be responsible for the data after the project is complete? Where will you save the files?
What outside resources do you need for your project? How much time will the project take your team to complete and audit? How much will it cost?

Organizing your project with a Data Management Plan

When working on any type of data project, planning ahead is a crucial step. Before starting in on a project, it’s important to think through as many of the details as possible so you can budget enough time and resources to accomplish all of the objectives. As a matter of fact, some organizations and government entities require a Data Management Plan (“DMP”) to be in place in all of their projects.

A DMP is a formal document that describes the data and what your team will do with it during and after the data project. Many organizations and agencies require one, and each entity has specific requirements for their DMPs.

DMPs can be created in just a simple readme.txt file, or can be as detailed as DMPs tailored to specific disciplines using online templates such as DMPTool.org. The DMPTool is designed to help create ready-to-use data management plans.

What attorneys should expect when working with an expert on a personal injury case

In most instances, analyses in personal injury cases are a necessity. Personal Injury cases require an expert to value the loss of earnings, ability, or life of an individual. In addition, experts can also calculate the loss of household services the individual’s household has suffered, that is the daily services someone would provide their children or spouse living in the home.

To begin performing an economic analysis of the loss of earnings of the injured, there is one crucial step that many attorneys try to sidestep: Hiring a vocational expert. Very few economic experts performing these types of analyses will make a judgement regarding the Plaintiff’s ability to work, and those experts that will, are not the ones an attorney wants to hire. Sure, doing this will save money, but if an attorney wants to cross all their T’s and dot all their I’s, he or she will need to hire a vocational expert. After crossing this bridge, the analysis should be smooth sailing.

Many attorneys ask economic experts to also analyze the Plaintiff’s loss of household services. In most personal injury cases, the Plaintiff has a reduced, or complete loss of, ability to perform tasks such as inside housework, cooking, shopping, and caring for household children. A major question in determining a loss of household services is, who was the Plaintiff providing household services to? Frequently, experts will provide this analysis knowing that the Plaintiff lives alone. Widely accepted economic theories and methodologies state that in order to provide household services to someone, they must be providing those services to someone. Often, those persons receiving these services would be children living in the household or a spouse. However, it is inappropriate to assign household services to someone who lives alone. It is important for attorneys, representing the Plaintiff or Defense, to keep this in mind as it can drastically affect the reliability of an expert’s analysis and be a major point of contention in a rebuttal report.