Corporate Greed Case Study: Enterprise Holdings & Its Impact on American Workers

TLDR: A federal lawsuit alleged that Enterprise Rent-A-Car and its parent holding company, Enterprise Holdings, Inc., systematically denied overtime pay to its assistant branch managers across the United States. By classifying these employees as “exempt” from overtime laws, the company allegedly withheld lawfully earned wages. When challenged in court, the corporation engaged in years of procedural delays and legal arguments over its own corporate structure, running out the clock on the statute of limitations. Ultimately, the claims of 1,462 workers who opted into the lawsuit were dismissed with prejudice, not because their claims lacked merit, but because the legal process was delayed until their right to sue had expired.

This case is a distressing illustration of how corporate power and legal complexity can combine to deny justice to working people. The following investigation details how it happened.

Introduction: Justice Runs Out of Time

For 1,462 assistant branch managers at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, justice had a deadline. They joined a collective action lawsuit alleging Enterprise Rent-A-Car had illegally denied them overtime pay, a practice that boosts corporate profits at the direct expense of its workforce.

They were not defeated on the facts of their case. Instead, they watched as their claims were extinguished by the slow, grinding mechanics of a legal system that proved more accommodating to corporate procedural tactics than to the substance of their grievance.

This case, which culminated in a federal appeals court decision on June 18, 2025, reveals more than just a dispute over wages. It exposes the structural failures that allow corporations to leverage complexity and delay as weapons against their own employees. It is a story of alleged wage theft enabled by legal loopholes, and of a justice system where winning can be as simple as running out the clock.

Inside the Allegations: A System of Unpaid Labor

The case began on December 21, 2017, when Mamadou Bah, an assistant branch manager for Enterprise in Massachusetts, filed a lawsuit against Enterprise Rent-A-Car Company of Boston, LLC, and its parent, Enterprise Holdings, Inc. The core allegation was straightforward: the companies had failed to pay overtime wages to Bah and other similarly situated assistant branch managers.

This was achieved by classifying them as “exempt” from the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the federal law guaranteeing overtime pay.

On November 9, 2016, Enterprise Rent-A-Car informed its assistant branch managers that their positions would be reclassified as non-exempt, making them eligible for overtime pay starting November 27, 2016. This reclassification was an implicit admission that the previous classification may have been improper. The lawsuit sought to recover the unpaid overtime for the years leading up to that date. The final paycheck that allegedly violated the FLSA by omitting this overtime was issued on December 2, 2016.

The legal battle that followed was not a simple examination of this central claim. It became a multi-year slog through motions, amended complaints, and procedural stays, all of which delayed a decision on the merits while the clock on the workers’ rights ticked away.

Date	Event	Outcome
Dec 21, 2017	Mamadou Bah files the initial lawsuit against Enterprise Boston and its parent company, EHI, alleging unpaid overtime. He also files a motion to notify other potential workers.	The legal process begins. The clock is ticking for other workers to join.
Jan 31, 2018	Enterprise attorneys ask the court to delay notifying other workers. They argue the court must first decide if the parent company, EHI, can even be sued, as it claims not to be the direct “employer.”	The court agrees, granting the stay. This is the first major delay, preventing other workers from being notified of their right to sue.
Sep 18, 2018	The court dismisses the claims against the parent company, EHI. It rules that the initial complaint failed to adequately prove EHI was a “joint employer.”	The nationwide scope of the lawsuit is now in jeopardy. The motion to notify workers is declared moot.
Oct 15, 2018	Bah files a First Amended Complaint, adding new allegations to prove the parent company, EHI, was the employer, based in part on a LinkedIn profile.	Enterprise challenges the new evidence as not being in “good faith,” creating another dispute and more delays.
Mar 6, 2020	After nearly 1.5 years of dispute over the First Amended Complaint, Bah files a Second Amended Complaint. By this time, the three-year statute of limitations for willful violations has expired for all potential workers.	The case against the parent company is now back on track, but it is too late for the thousands of workers who were never notified.
Jun 28, 2022	After more legal fights, the District Court finally authorizes that a notice be sent to other workers. Over four and a half years have passed since the first request.	1,462 workers formally opt-in, but their claims are all expired unless the court grants “equitable tolling” to forgive the delay.
Oct 24, 2023	The District Court denies the request for equitable tolling. It blames the delays on the plaintiff’s “pleading errors” and decertifies the class, dismissing all 1,462 opt-in plaintiffs’ claims with prejudice.	The workers lose their case based on a technicality, without a ruling on the merits of their unpaid overtime claims.

Regulatory Loopholes: The System’s Built-In Hurdles

The American legal system contains features that, while neutral on their face, are often weaponized in the context of corporate power imbalances. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, workers seeking to bring a group lawsuit must do so through a “collective action.” Unlike a typical “class action” where similarly harmed people are automatically included unless they opt out, an FLSA collective action requires every single worker to affirmatively “opt in” by filing a written consent form with the court.

Crucially, the statute of limitations—the deadline to file a claim—is not paused for potential members when the initial lawsuit is filed. It continues to run for each individual worker until the day they file their personal consent form.

This structure creates a powerful incentive for corporations to delay the notification process. Every month that passes without a court-approved notice being sent to potential plaintiffs means that more workers’ claims will permanently expire.

In the Enterprise case, the corporation’s attorneys successfully argued for a stay on the notification motion just one month into the case. They argued that the court first needed to resolve whether the parent holding company, Enterprise Holdings, Inc. (EHI), was a “joint employer.” This question, centered on the company’s own corporate structure, became the basis for years of delays that ultimately proved fatal to the workers’ claims.

Profit-Maximization at All Costs: The Business of Unpaid Wages

A corporation’s primary directive under neoliberal capitalism is the maximization of shareholder value. Reducing labor costs is one of the most direct paths to increasing profits. The alleged misclassification of assistant branch managers as “exempt” salaried employees who are not entitled to overtime is a classic strategy to achieve this goal. It transforms a legally mandated labor cost into corporate revenue.

The lawsuit alleged this practice continued until November 27, 2016. The company’s decision to reclassify the positions going forward, while simultaneously fighting to avoid paying for past violations, reflects a purely economic calculation. The goal was to cap liability and prevent future losses, not to rectify past harm. The millions of dollars in allegedly unpaid overtime were treated not as a debt owed to workers, but as a risk to be managed and minimized through aggressive legal defense.

This approach reveals an incentive structure where the potential reward of systematic wage theft outweighs the risk of being caught. Even when challenged, Enterprise Rent-A-Car could fall back on a complex, expensive, and time-consuming legal process—a process that it was far better equipped to endure than the individual workers it had allegedly underpaid.

The Economic Fallout: A Direct Transfer of Wealth

The financial consequences of this case are not abstract. They are measured in the lost wages of 1,462 specific individuals and their families. While the court never calculated the exact amount of unpaid overtime, FLSA lawsuits frequently involve substantial sums, representing money that would have been used for mortgages, groceries, education, and other essential household expenses.

The dismissal of these claims represents a direct transfer of wealth. The money that should have been in the paychecks of assistant managers remained on the corporate ledger, contributing to profits and executive compensation. This is not a secondary effect of the market; it is a primary outcome of a system where labor protections can be rendered meaningless by legal procedure. The economic fallout is borne entirely by the workers who were denied their day in court.

Exploitation of Workers: An Imbalance of Power

The court documents provide a glimpse into the reality faced by the workers. Of the 1,462 individuals who joined the suit, 1,192 submitted identical, signed declarations stating they were unaware of the case or their potential claims before receiving the court-ordered notice in mid-2022. One declared: “The only way that I became aware of my rights under the Federal [Fair] Labor Standards Act was by receiving the notice.”

This highlights the profound information asymmetry between large corporations and their employees. Companies have entire departments dedicated to navigating labor law to their advantage, while workers are often unaware of their basic rights. Affidavits from a few workers reveal further feelings of powerlessness. One person stated, “[it] was difficult to speak up,” while another was “unaware of the overtime laws and how it correlated with exemption status.”

Another worker explained their delay by stating they were “under the assumption per our HR department and leadership at the time that we were base salary plus bonus employees,” demonstrating how corporate messaging can effectively obscure legal realities. This environment of engineered ignorance and fear is the foundation upon which worker exploitation is built. The lawsuit was the only viable path to challenge this power dynamic, and that path was ultimately blocked.

Community Impact: A Nationwide Ripple Effect

While the lawsuit originated in Boston, it sought to represent assistant branch managers “who have worked for Enterprise across the country.” The 1,462 workers who joined the suit resided in communities nationwide. The denial of their claims is not a localized event but a national one, with consequences that ripple through hundreds of local economies.

Every dollar of unpaid overtime is a dollar not spent at a local business, not saved for a down payment, and not invested in a child’s future. When multiplied across more than a thousand families, the collective impact represents a significant drain on community resources. The legal decision made in a federal courthouse has tangible, negative effects on the economic stability of households from coast to coast, reinforcing a cycle where corporate wealth is protected at the expense of community well-being.

The PR Machine: Litigation as a Tactic

Modern corporations understand that a lawsuit is a battle of public perception as much as legal argument. While the court record does not detail a public relations campaign, it exhaustively documents a litigation strategy that served the same purpose: to control the narrative and defeat the claims without ever addressing their substance.

The company’s lawyers repeatedly and successfully focused the court’s attention away from the central question of unpaid overtime. They instead created a series of procedural sideshows. First, they contested whether the national parent company, EHI, was the actual employer. Then, after the plaintiff filed an amended complaint with new evidence involving an employee named Dwayne Walker, they challenged the “good-faith basis” of that evidence. This dispute over a single employee’s LinkedIn profile contributed to a delay of nearly a year and a half.

This is corporate spin in action. By framing the plaintiff’s efforts as legally flawed “pleading errors,” the corporate lawyers painted themselves as defenders of legal propriety. The court ultimately adopted this frame, stating that “as a result of Bah’s pleading errors,” there was no valid complaint until after the statute of limitations had already passed. The legal tactic was a complete success: it shifted the blame for the delay onto the victims and transformed a substantive wage dispute into a technicality.

Wealth Disparity & Corporate Greed

This case is a microcosm of the broader economic trends defining modern America. It demonstrates how the legal and economic systems are structured to facilitate the upward movement of wealth. The money at the heart of this dispute—overtime wages legally mandated by the FLSA—represents a fundamental protection designed to ensure that working people share in the value they create.

By misclassifying employees, a corporation can suppress this mechanism of wealth distribution. When challenged, it can then deploy vast legal resources to exhaust its opponents, who are often represented by firms working on contingency. The defendants in this case were represented by two powerful corporate law firms, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and Seyfarth Shaw LLP, against the plaintiffs’ smaller, specialized firm.

The outcome—whereby 1,462 workers’ claims are nullified while the corporation admits no wrongdoing and pays nothing—is a stark reflection of this power imbalance. It reinforces a system where the rewards of labor flow to capital, not because of innovation or efficiency, but because of a superior ability to manipulate a legal system that is too complex, too slow, and too expensive for ordinary citizens to navigate effectively.

Global Parallels: A Pattern of Predation

The tactics alleged in the Enterprise case are not unique to one company or one country. Within the framework of global capitalism, multinational corporations frequently use legal and structural complexity to minimize labor costs and liabilities. Employee misclassification is a widely recognized strategy used across various sectors to deny workers benefits, protections, and legally mandated wages like overtime.

Similarly, the use of intricate corporate structures, such as parent holding companies and geographically distinct subsidiaries, is a common feature of modern business. This model allows for centralized control over policy and finance while creating a decentralized legal liability. It creates a playbook that can be deployed anywhere that labor laws can be challenged through superior legal resources and strategic delays, making the struggle of the Enterprise workers a local manifestation of a global phenomenon.

Corporate Accountability Fails the Public

The final judgment in this case represents a profound failure of corporate accountability. The 1,462 workers who joined the lawsuit had their claims dismissed “with prejudice,” meaning they are permanently barred from seeking justice for the alleged unpaid wages. This outcome was not reached because a court determined they were paid fairly. It happened because the legal system allowed the clock to run out.

The court concluded that the significant delays in the case were ultimately the fault of the plaintiff’s “pleading errors” and a lack of diligence. In doing so, it placed the burden of navigating a complex and hostile legal terrain entirely on the workers. The corporation, which benefited directly from every moment of delay, faced no penalty.

This result sends a clear message: a corporation with sufficient resources can defeat a meritorious claim by entangling it in procedural knots until it expires. Accountability becomes optional, and the public is left with a system that validates legal maneuvering over the fundamental right to be paid for one’s work.

Pathways for Reform & Consumer Advocacy

The failings exposed by the Enterprise case highlight an urgent need for legal and structural reform. To prevent such outcomes in the future, several changes are necessary to rebalance the scales of justice between corporations and workers.

First, the “opt-in” requirement for FLSA collective actions could be reformed. Shifting to an “opt-out” model, standard in other class-action lawsuits, would automatically include all affected workers, dramatically increasing their collective power. This would force corporations to contend with the full scope of their potential liability from the outset.

Second, the law must address the strategic use of delays. The statute of limitations for workers in a collective action should be automatically paused, or “tolled,” from the moment the first legal complaint is filed. This single reform would eliminate the primary incentive for corporations to engage in the kind of procedural warfare that doomed the Enterprise workers’ claims. Stronger penalties for wage theft and employee misclassification would further deter the behavior before it starts, shifting the financial calculation from a manageable risk to a significant liability.

Legal Minimalism: Doing Just Enough

The principle of legal minimalism involves complying with the letter of the law, but not its spirit, especially when it is financially advantageous. Enterprise’s conduct exemplifies this approach. The company reclassified its assistant branch managers as non-exempt on November 27, 2016, thereby complying with overtime law from that day forward.

This action, however, was coupled with a fierce legal battle to avoid any responsibility for the years prior. It reflects a strategy of containing legal risk rather than embracing ethical responsibility. The company did just enough to stop future liability from accumulating, while investing heavily to ensure it would not have to pay for its past conduct, perfectly illustrating a system where compliance is treated as a forward-looking cost-management tool, not a moral baseline.

How Capitalism Exploits Delay: The Strategic Use of Time

In a capitalist system, time is not just money; it is a strategic weapon. The Enterprise case serves as a masterclass in how corporations can exploit the passage of time to their advantage. From the moment the lawsuit was filed, the company’s legal strategy was predicated on creating and capitalizing on delay.

The first critical delay was the successful motion to stay the notification of other workers pending a ruling on the parent company’s status as an “employer.” This immediately paused the momentum of the collective action. The subsequent challenges to amended complaints, including a dispute over a LinkedIn profile, were not just legal arguments; they were tactical maneuvers that consumed precious months and years, all while the statute of limitations for 1,462 workers was silently expiring. The court’s eventual finding that the plaintiff was not diligent enough effectively ratified the success of this strategy, rewarding the party that benefited most from the system’s slowness.

The Language of Legitimacy: How Courts Frame Harm

Legal language has a powerful ability to neutralize the human stakes of a dispute, transforming a story of harm into a sterile, technical problem. The court’s decision in the Enterprise case is filled with this kind of legitimizing language. The core issue of thousands of workers being denied overtime pay was sidelined in favor of a dispassionate analysis of “pleading errors,” “diligence,” and whether litigation delays constituted an “extraordinary circumstance.”

By focusing on whether the plaintiff’s attorneys acted with perfect procedural foresight, the court reframed the narrative. The workers were no longer victims of alleged wage theft, but participants in a flawed legal effort. Phrases like “not reasonably diligent” and “defective pleading” carry the weight of legal authority, effectively obscuring the profound power imbalance that defined the conflict from its inception. This is how systems of power perpetuate themselves: by creating a specialized language that makes unjust outcomes sound like the reasonable application of neutral rules.

Profiting from Complexity: When Obscurity Shields Misconduct

Corporate complexity is a strategic choice. In the Enterprise case, the dual structure of a national parent holding company (EHI) and a local operating subsidiary (Enterprise Boston) was not a mere organizational chart detail; it was Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s primary legal shield. The argument that EHI was not a “joint employer” and therefore could not be sued by employees nationwide became the cornerstone of its defense.

This strategy allowed the corporation to profit from its own engineered complexity. It created a legal maze that the plaintiff had to navigate, leading to the “pleading errors” the court would later cite as the reason for denying the workers’ claims. By diffusing responsibility across multiple corporate entities, Enterprise Rent-A-Car made it extraordinarily difficult to hold the central decision-making body accountable. In late-stage capitalism, this kind of structural opacity is not a bug; it is a feature designed to frustrate legal challenges and protect centralized power.

This Is the System Working as Intended

It is tempting to view the outcome of the Enterprise lawsuit as a failure of the justice system. It is more accurate, however, to see it as the system working exactly as it was designed. A legal framework that prioritizes procedural perfection over substantive justice, that grants immense power to corporate defendants, and that contains structural loopholes like the FLSA’s opt-in requirement will predictably produce such results.

The court did not break its own rules; it followed them. Those rules, operating within a broader economic system that prioritizes capital over labor, led to a conclusion where 1,462 wage claims were extinguished on a technicality. This case is not an aberration. It is a predictable consequence of a system where corporate power is protected, legal complexity is rewarded, and the path to justice for ordinary people is long, expensive, and fraught with peril.

Conclusion: The High Cost of a Blocked Path

The story of Mamadou Bah and the 1,462 workers who joined him is more than a failed lawsuit. It is a clear indictment of a system that is failing to provide a meaningful check on corporate power. The case demonstrates that even when workers organize and seek redress through the prescribed legal channels, the structural advantages afforded to large corporations can render their efforts futile. The path to accountability was not just difficult; it was ultimately blocked by the very procedures meant to guide it.

The human cost is measured in the lost wages and diminished faith of thousands of workers. The societal cost is the erosion of the principle that work merits fair pay and that no entity is above the law. This legal battle illustrates a deep and systemic failure in how modern economies and their justice systems protect corporations far more effectively than they protect the communities and workers that allow them to thrive.

Frivolous or Serious Lawsuit?

The lawsuit against Enterprise was unequivocally serious. The central claim—that a company systematically misclassified a whole category of employees to avoid paying overtime—is a significant allegation of wage theft under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The gravity of the claim is underscored by the fact that 1,462 individuals from across the country felt strongly enough to formally opt in to the case, demonstrating a widespread and shared grievance.

Furthermore, Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s own action of reclassifying its assistant branch managers from “exempt” to “non-exempt” status in 2016 lends credence to the argument that the prior classification was, at a minimum, questionable.

The court never dismissed the case as frivolous or lacking merit. It was dismissed on the procedural grounds of timeliness, a technicality that only became fatal because of the years-long battle the corporation waged to delay the proceedings. This was a legitimate legal grievance that was defeated by strategy, not by substance.

💡 Explore Corporate Misconduct by Category

Corporations harm people every day — from wage theft to pollution. Learn more by exploring key areas of injustice.

• 💀 Product Safety Violations — When companies risk lives for profit.
• 🌿 Environmental Violations — Pollution, ecological collapse, and unchecked greed.
• 💼 Labor Exploitation — Wage theft, worker abuse, and unsafe conditions.
• 🛡️ Data Breaches & Privacy Abuses — Misuse and mishandling of personal information.
• 💵 Financial Fraud & Corruption — Lies, scams, and executive impunity.

NOTE:

This website is facing massive amounts of headwind trying to procure the lawsuits relating to corporate misconduct. We are being pimp-slapped by a quadruple whammy:

1. The Trump regime's reversal of the laws & regulations meant to protect us is making it so victims are no longer filing lawsuits for shit which was previously illegal.
2. Donald Trump's defunding of regulatory agencies led to the frequency of enforcement actions severely decreasing. What's more, the quality of the enforcement actions has also plummeted.
3. The GOP's insistence on cutting the healthcare funding for millions of Americans in order to give their billionaire donors additional tax cuts has recently shut the government down. This government shut down has also impacted the aforementioned defunded agencies capabilities to crack down on evil-doers. Donald Trump has since threatened to make these agency shutdowns permanent on account of them being "democrat agencies".
4. My access to the LexisNexis legal research platform got revoked. This isn't related to Trump or anything, but it still hurt as I'm being forced to scrounge around public sources to find legal documents now. Sadge.

All four of these factors are severely limiting my ability to access stories of corporate misconduct.

Due to this, I have temporarily decreased the amount of articles published everyday from 5 down to 3, and I will also be publishing articles from previous years as I was fortunate enough to download a butt load of EPA documents back in 2022 and 2023 to make YouTube videos with.... This also means that you'll be seeing many more environmental violation stories going forward :3

Thank you for your attention to this matter,

Aleeia (owner and publisher of www.evilcorporations.com)

Also, can we talk about how ICE has a $170 billion annual budget, while the EPA-- which protects the air we breathe and water we drink-- barely clocks $4 billion? Just something to think about....