The Non-Financial Ledger: What These Workers Actually Lost

Imagine working a 50-hour week and getting paid for 40. Not because your employer made a mistake. Because your employer decided, officially, that you were a manager and therefore the extra hours were yours to give for free. That was the reality for assistant branch managers at Enterprise Rent-A-Car locations across the United States. They ran branches. They dealt with customers, handled problems, covered shifts. And when the week ended, they got the same check regardless of how many hours it took.

Mamadou Bah worked at various Enterprise Boston locations between May 2014 and January 2017. He assumed the title of assistant branch manager in July 2016. For months, he and thousands of colleagues were told, explicitly or implicitly, that their salary covered everything. The federal law that says you must be paid time-and-a-half after 40 hours did not apply to them, they were told. They were exempt. They were managers.

Then, on November 9, 2016, a memo arrived. It said that starting November 27, 2016, the assistant branch manager classification was changing to non-exempt. Starting in two weeks, they would be entitled to overtime. The memo did not explain what changed. It did not address the years of overtime those workers had already given. It simply announced a new reality going forward and left everything before it on the floor.

When workers eventually signed on to Bah’s lawsuit in 2022, they explained, in their own words, why they had not come forward sooner. One wrote: “I was under the assumption per our HR department and leadership at the time that we were base salary plus bonus employees.” This person was not ignorant. They had been actively told, by the people in charge of managing them, that their pay structure was lawful. They trusted it. They had no reason not to.

Another wrote: “I did not bring my claim before December 2018 or 2019 because I was unaware of how to question Enterprise Rent-A-Car about the exemption status and classification. I also was unaware of the overtime laws and how it correlated with exemption status.” This is a person who knew something felt wrong but did not have the legal vocabulary or the institutional support to push back. The law is not taught in onboarding. HR is not there to tell you when you are being underpaid.

A third wrote only that “extraordinary circumstances” prevented them from coming forward. A fourth said “it was difficult to speak up.” These are not excuses. These are descriptions of what it feels like to be a low-to-mid-level worker who suspects their employer is breaking the law but has no power, no knowledge, and no safe channel to act on that suspicion.

1,192 of the 1,462 workers who opted into Bah’s case signed identical declarations confirming they had not known about the lawsuit or their right to overtime until the July 26, 2022 notice arrived. The court that dismissed their claims did not dispute this. It simply ruled that not knowing your rights is not the same as being legally excused for missing a filing deadline. The workers’ ignorance, sustained and arguably engineered by the corporate environment they worked in, did not count as an extraordinary circumstance. Their claims were dismissed with prejudice. That means they cannot bring them again.

Legal Receipts: What the Court Documents Actually Say

These are not allegations. These are findings and statements that appear in the official court record of Kwoka et al. v. Enterprise Rent-A-Car Company of Boston, LLC; Enterprise Holdings, Inc., No. 24-1126, decided June 18, 2025, by the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

“Prior to November 27, 2016, assistant branch manager positions were classified as ‘exempt’ from overtime requirements of the FLSA and Massachusetts law. On November 9, 2016, however, Bah received a memorandum informing him that his position would be reclassified as non-exempt starting with the pay period beginning November 27, 2016.”

Source: First Circuit Opinion, pp. 4–5

• Enterprise unilaterally changed the classification it had used to deny overtime, with no retroactive correction. The reclassification is a documented admission that the prior classification was wrong under the law.
• Workers received a memo informing them of the change with roughly 18 days’ notice. There was no offer of back pay. There was no acknowledgment of what had been taken.

“Prior to receiving the notice of my right to opt in to this case that was issued on July 26, 2022, I was not aware of the case, nor was I aware that I potentially had a claim for unpaid overtime against Enterprise. The only way that I became aware of my rights under the Federal [Fair] Labor Standards Act was by receiving the notice.”

Source: Template Declaration, signed by 1,192 of 1,462 opt-in plaintiffs, quoted in First Circuit Opinion, p. 13

• 1,192 workers signed this exact statement under oath. These are not people who knew they were owed money and chose not to file. These are people who had no idea the law even protected them.
• The court acknowledged this fact and still dismissed their claims. The legal standard for equitable tolling requires workers to prove both that they pursued their rights “diligently” and faced an “extraordinary circumstance.” Simply not knowing your employer broke the law does not qualify.

“I didn’t file a claim before the [expiration of the statute of limitations] because I was under the assumption per our HR department and leadership at the time that we were base salary plus bonus employees.”

Source: Individual opt-in plaintiff affidavit, quoted in First Circuit Opinion, p. 14

• This worker was actively told, by the company’s own human resources department, that their pay structure was lawful. Enterprise’s internal authority figures were the source of their belief that no violation was occurring.
• Despite this, the court found no evidence that “defendants misled the putative plaintiffs” because no worker demonstrated that the company’s misleading conduct was the specific cause of their failure to file on time. The bar is set so high that HR actively misinforming workers still does not meet it.

“[A]s a result of Bah’s pleading errors, there was no operative complaint for which to authorize notice until after the statute of limitations had passed.”

Source: First Circuit Opinion, p. 19, summarizing District Court finding

• The court pinned the delay on Bah’s failure to correctly plead that Enterprise Holdings, Inc. (the parent company) was a joint employer of the assistant branch managers. The initial complaint used an “integrated enterprise” theory that two other circuits had already rejected.
• This pleading argument allowed the court to conclude that the delay was the plaintiff’s fault, not the court’s, and therefore not an “extraordinary circumstance” that would justify tolling the clock for 1,462 workers who knew nothing about any of this legal maneuvering.

“The defendants could not have predicted who, if anyone, would ultimately consent to opt in to this case and try to collect relevant evidence for a nationwide class.”

Source: First Circuit Opinion, p. 19, summarizing District Court’s prejudice finding

• The court also ruled that Enterprise would be prejudiced if tolling were granted, because they could not have predicted how many workers would join and thus could not have preserved evidence for a nationwide class.
• This reasoning rewards Enterprise’s delay strategy. The longer the company fought the notice motion, the more workers’ claims expired, and the smaller the final class would be. A smaller class means less evidence needed, which is a benefit to the company, reframed here as a legal harm.

Societal Impact Mapping: Who Pays When Wage Theft Wins in Court

Public Health

Wage theft operates as a slow financial bleed. The workers affected in this case were not executives. Assistant branch managers are front-line, customer-facing workers who deal with the daily grind of a car rental operation.

• Unpaid overtime is not a technicality. For hourly and lower-salaried workers, the gap between what was owed and what was paid can represent hundreds or thousands of dollars per year in missing income, directly affecting housing stability, food security, healthcare access, and the ability to absorb any unexpected cost.
• The stress of working unpaid hours while managing a rental branch, dealing with customer complaints, and being told by HR that your pay is lawful creates a documented class of psychological burden. Financial insecurity from wage theft is directly linked to higher rates of anxiety, depression, and stress-related illness in the economic literature on low-wage labor exploitation.
• Workers who signed affidavits said they felt it was “difficult to speak up.” The fear of retaliation for questioning pay practices is a well-documented suppression mechanism in hourly and salaried service work. That fear itself is a health burden, carried in silence, that the law as applied here provided no relief for.
• The dismissal of 1,462 claims leaves those workers with no legal remedy and no back pay. Any financial harm they suffered from the wage theft compounds over time through lost savings, delayed debt reduction, and interest on debts they carried because their income was artificially suppressed.

Economic Inequality

This case is a masterclass in how the legal architecture of wage law functionally protects corporations while leaving workers with no viable path to recovery.

• The FLSA’s opt-in structure means the statute of limitations runs individually against every potential plaintiff from the day of the violation, not from the day a class is certified or notice is issued. A worker who never knew the law was broken has no way to stop that clock. It is a structural design that rewards employer delay and worker ignorance in equal measure.
• Enterprise deployed two of the most expensive corporate law firms in the country: Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and Seyfarth Shaw LLP. The workers’ side was represented by Lichten & Liss-Riordan, P.C. This is a routine asymmetry in wage litigation, where employers have unlimited legal budgets and workers share a single legal team that works largely on contingency.
• The court’s ruling that categorical tolling was unavailable means future workers in FLSA collective actions face the same impossible situation. Even if a court takes four years to authorize a notice, every potential plaintiff whose claim expired in that window gets nothing, regardless of why the delay happened.
• Enterprise Holdings is a privately held company estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars. The wages it withheld from assistant branch managers across the country represent a fraction of its operating margin. For the individual workers, those wages were not a fraction of anything. They were the whole paycheck.
• The 1,462 workers who opted in received nothing. Enterprise paid no fine, no back wages, and no damages. The cost of breaking federal labor law, in this case, was the cost of the lawyers it hired to fight the lawsuit. For a company of Enterprise’s scale, that is an acceptable line item.
• The ruling sets a precedent that encourages employers to contest the employer status of parent companies in collective actions. Every motion to dismiss on that basis burns down the clock on workers’ claims. This is now established playbook, with a First Circuit endorsement.

The Cost of a Life: What the Numbers Mean

What Now? Who to Pressure and How to Fight Back

The First Circuit’s ruling is final as to these 1,462 workers. There is no appeal left in this case. But the ruling’s logic, that courts can delay notice in FLSA collective actions without triggering equitable tolling for workers who never knew they had a claim, creates a roadmap for every major employer in the country. The fight moves to Congress, to regulators, and to the people organizing in every warehouse, rental lot, and service counter in the United States.

Corporate Roles to Hold Accountable

Regulatory Watchlist

Mutual Aid, Organizing, and Grassroots Resistance