This morning the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that pharmaceutical representatives are “outside salesmen” exempt from the overtime requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Christopher v. Smithkline Beecham Corp. (.pdf).
This has been a hotly-contested issue in the courts and the subject of a split between the federal appellate courts, with the Ninth
The Seventh Circuit recently weighed in on whether pharmaceutical sales representatives are exempt under the FLSA in Susan Schaeffer-LaRose v. Eli Lilly & Company. In this consolidated case, the Seventh Circuit focused on the administrative exemption in determining that the sales representatives were exempt. Because the Court found that the sales representatives met the
In a previous post in August, I questioned whether the pharmaceutical companies were losing the exemption battle as it related to pharmaceutical sales representatives and the outside sales exemption. The Supreme Court had declined to review the Second Circuit’s Novartis holding that pharmaceutical sales representatives do not qualify for the outside sales exemption because they
Recently, another group of pharmaceutical sales representatives successfully demonstrated that they are not exempt from overtime under the FLSA. Kuzinski, et al., v. Schering Corp Focusing on the administrative exemption, the District Court of Connecticut held that the sales representatives’ work was not directly related to Schering’s management or general business operations and they lacked