PepsiCo fired technician for demanding pay from login, lawsuit alleges

A longtime PepsiCo service technician says he lost his job for one reason: he kept insisting the company pay him for his full workday, not just part of it. In a complaint filed September 4, 2026 in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the worker – who the filing says spent more than five years in the role – alleges PepsiCo and an affiliate, Grayhawk Leasing, refused to count time he worked before and after his official hours, then fired him weeks after he pushed back.

The setup will sound familiar to anyone running a mobile or field workforce. Each morning, the technician logged into a company iPad, picked up his routes and job assignments, and drove a company vehicle to his first stop, according to the complaint. None of that counted as paid time, the filing says. Under the policy it describes, technicians who took vehicles home had to reach their first job by 10:00 a.m., with pay starting only then – regardless of when they logged in or how far they had to drive. During a period when his territory sat about an hour and a half from home, the complaint says, that meant roughly three hours of unpaid driving a day. Technicians who worked past 6:30 p.m. had to punch out and then drive home unpaid, the filing alleges, still responsible for the vehicle and its equipment.

The technician says he contacted the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry, which, according to the complaint, told him he was entitled to be paid from the time he logged on until he logged off. He raised the issue with managers, in group settings, and during a company investigation, the filing says. It describes a meeting at which a manager told him to “shut up and grab a sandwich” – an exchange the complaint says prompted him to file an internal HR complaint in December 2024. Nothing meaningful came of it, the filing alleges.