The actions allege that workers' commissions, incentives and other payments were not included in calculating employees' overtime pay. The payments in question are those employees received for selling certain products and signing customers up for credit cards. Federal law mandates that nonexempt employees working more than 40 hours a week receive time-and-a-half pay based on their "regular rate" of compensation. Whether the commissions and other incentive pay are part of the workers' "regular rate" will have to be decided by the courts. The companies named as defendants in the action are Lowe's Companies, Inc., Lowe's Home Center, Inc., Lowe's HIW, Inc., The Contractor Yard, Inc., and Eagle Hardware and Garden Distribution Services.

You can check your paycheck to verify whether or not you qualify to participate in this action. Take a look at a paycheck in which you received both overtime pay and some form of incentive pay (incentives, commissions, bonuses, SPIFFS, SOS, credit card incentives, etc.). You may notice that your overtime rate does not include within it the amounts you received that week for incentive pay. If your paycheck does not include those amounts, you are eligible to take part in this action.

Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, employees are generally not entitled to their lost overtime pay for hours they worked more than two, or in some cases three, years ago. Once you join this action, you can only collect lost wages for two or three years prior to that date, nothing more. To stop this clock from running out on your claims and to prevent yourself from losing any more money, you need to join the action as soon as possible.

There are three basic requirements to join this lawsuit:

1. You have to be a current or a former employee in any position who worked at Lowe's within the last three years;

2. During those three years, you had to be paid some form of overtime pay; and

3. During those three years, you also had to received at least some incentive pay (such as commissions, bonuses, special incentives, SPIFFS, SOS, credit card payments, etc.).

Both hourly and salaried exempt employees can qualify as long as they were paid overtime. Also, all positions potentially qualify (including cashier, delivery, receiving, stock and administration) even if your position did not qualify for SPIFFS or commissions. As long as the position was paid any type of bonus, the action alleges that the bonus had to be used to calculate overtime.