Store managers sue Monro, claim 52-hour weeks came with no overtime

At the heart of the dispute is a question HR professionals grapple with regularly: when does a manager stop being a manager?

The lawsuit alleges that Tire Choice slapped the exempt label on its store managers despite the fact that their day-to-day work looked nothing like what the Fair Labor Standards Act envisions for executive employees. According to court documents, these managers spent nearly all their time performing non-managerial manual labor, helping customers and working on vehicles.

The numbers paint a demanding picture. Store managers were allegedly required to work a minimum of 52 hours per week. In practice, plaintiffs Anthony Daley Speranza and Raymond Thomas Henry Jr say they averaged around 12.5 hours a day, six days a week. Speranza claims he worked open to close, seven days a week, during a stretch from August to November 2023, taking just eight days off during his first six and a half months on the job.

Despite these hours, the managers saw no overtime pay. When you do the math on their actual hours worked, their compensation amounted to somewhere between $15 and $17 an hour, according to the filing.

The lawsuit points to a labor allocation system that allegedly made long hours unavoidable. Tire Choice’s corporate office reportedly capped the number of hours stores could assign to hourly workers each week, but those limits did not apply to salaried managers. When staffing ran thin, managers had to pick up the slack themselves.