FS Blinds sent three men out at 5:00 in the morning, worked them until midnight, paid them per job with no overtime, kept zero records of their hours as federal law required, and then told a court those men couldn’t prove they were owed a single extra dollar.

How FS Blinds Built Its Business on Stolen Wages

A Texas window blind installer weaponized its own illegal recordkeeping to bury an overtime lawsuit. A federal appeals court just said: not so fast. — Filed July 12, 2023

A Company That Runs on Other People’s Exhaustion

FS Blinds, LLC is a seller and installer of window blinds based out of Pearland, Texas, operating across the greater Houston area. The company owns the warehouse, stocks the inventory, dispatches the jobs, and collects the revenue. The actual labor — measuring windows, hauling blinds to job sites in newly constructed homes, installing them, and driving across one of the most spread-out metro areas in the United States — fell entirely on the workers.

Jose Flores worked for FS Blinds from mid-April 2018 until early October 2019. Jean Romero-Rodriguez worked from early March 2019 until late October 2019. Brandon Villarreal worked from early August 2018 until early April 2020, with some breaks in between. Each of them received flat fees — a fixed amount per window measured, per blind installed, per repair completed — with no regard for how long any single job took, how far they had to drive, or how many hours they put in on a given day.

FS Blinds classified all three as “independent contractors.” That classification is not a neutral administrative label. It is the legal mechanism the company used to avoid paying overtime wages required under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Independent contractors don’t get overtime. Employees do. That distinction is worth real money — and FS Blinds bet the workers wouldn’t fight to get it.

Days That Started Before Dawn and Ended After Dark

Flores and Romero-Rodriguez reported to the FS Blinds warehouse each morning between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m. to pick up that day’s blinds. Villarreal arrived between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. From there, they fanned out across Houston to complete job lists dispatched to them by the company the afternoon before.

Their days did not end early. Flores usually finished between 8:30 and 10:00 p.m. — and sometimes worked as late as midnight. Romero-Rodriguez typically wrapped up between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. Villarreal finished between 7:00 and 10:00 p.m. These were not occasional long days. This was the routine. All three workers estimated they averaged approximately 70 hours per week.

The workers mostly operated Monday through Friday, sometimes Saturdays. Their schedules varied — some weeks lighter, some weeks heavier. But through that variation, their sworn testimony pointed to one consistent fact: they were regularly working far more than 40 hours a week, and FS Blinds wasn’t paying them a dollar extra for any of it.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What a 70-Hour Week Actually Takes

The court document is written in the precise, measured language of federal appellate law. It talks about “prima facie burdens” and “burden-shifting frameworks.” What it does not do — because it does not have to — is describe what it actually costs a human being to roll out of bed before sunrise every single Monday morning, drive to a warehouse in Pearland, and haul window blinds across the sprawling Houston metro until the night sky is fully dark.

Flores arrived at the warehouse between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m. That means his alarm went off before 4:30 a.m. on a regular basis. He then drove to job sites, measured and installed blinds in homes he would never live in, drove to the next site, and the next, until he finished — usually between 8:30 and 10:00 p.m., sometimes at midnight. That is not a long day. That is a second full shift bolted onto the back of a first one. That is the kind of schedule that eats relationships, wrecks sleep, destroys physical health, and slowly dismantles the human capacity to imagine a different life.

The federal law that FS Blinds violated — the Fair Labor Standards Act — was created precisely because Congress understood that when workers have no power to negotiate, employers will take every available hour of their lives in exchange for as little money as possible. The overtime premium exists to make it expensive to demand those extra hours. FS Blinds bypassed that protection entirely by stamping the word “contractor” on three workers who did nothing but show up every morning and execute the company’s job list.

The Paperwork Vanished — Conveniently

Here is a detail that deserves to stand on its own: FS Blinds was legally required under the FLSA to keep records of the hours these workers put in. The company kept none. Zero records of when Flores, Romero-Rodriguez, and Villarreal started each day. Zero records of when they finished. Zero records of how many hours they logged across the weeks and months they spent working for FS Blinds.

The company then turned around and used the absence of those records as a sword against the workers in court. Without records, the workers couldn’t prove exactly how many overtime hours they were owed. Without exact figures, FS Blinds argued, they had no claim. This is the playbook: break the law by not keeping records, then use the resulting evidentiary gap to escape the consequences of breaking the law. The Supreme Court saw this trick coming back in 1946 and created the Mt. Clemens standard specifically to stop it from working. FS Blinds tried it anyway.

The appeals court was unambiguous. Under Mt. Clemens, an employer cannot “benefit from its failure to keep required payroll records, thereby making the best evidence of damages unavailable.” FS Blinds created the problem and then asked the court to reward it for doing so. A federal appellate panel said no. Three workers who woke up before dawn for years and drove blinds across Houston in their own vehicles deserved at least the chance to tell a court what was done to them.

The Contractor Label as a Poverty Machine

The “independent contractor” classification is one of the most powerful poverty-generation tools available to a modern business. It sounds neutral. It even sounds empowering — you’re your own boss, setting your own schedule, running your own operation. The reality for Flores, Romero-Rodriguez, and Villarreal was that FS Blinds sent them job lists every afternoon, dispatched them every morning, owned every blind they installed, and controlled the inventory they depended on to do their work. They used their own vehicles and their own tools, but the economic engine they were plugged into belonged entirely to FS Blinds.

The actual test under federal law — whether a worker is “economically dependent” on the business or truly “in business for themselves” — cuts through the label and looks at reality. The five-factor test the appeals court referenced asks about control, investment, profit-and-loss exposure, skill requirements, and permanency of the relationship. Those facts still need to be argued on remand. But what is already on the record paints a picture of workers who were, by any honest measure, dependent on FS Blinds for their livelihood and subject to its direction every working day.

They Said It in Writing: The Court’s Own Words

“Because FS Blinds did not keep records of Plaintiffs’ time, it cannot produce ‘evidence of the precise amount of work [Plaintiffs] performed.'” — Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 22-20095, July 12, 2023

“The employer cannot really complain that matters are left in great uncertainty.” — Mitchell v. Mitchell Truck Line, Inc., cited by the Fifth Circuit in this decision

“Such a perverse incentive would ‘penalize the employee by denying him any recovery on the ground that he is unable to prove the precise extent of uncompensated work,’ thereby contravening ‘[t]he remedial nature of [the FLSA] and the great public policy which it embodies.'” — Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., cited by the Fifth Circuit in this decision

“The Mt. Clemens framework might seem ‘lenient,’ [but] it is ‘rooted in the view that an employer [should not] benefit from its failure to keep required payroll records, thereby making the best evidence of damages unavailable.'” — U.S. Dep’t of Labor v. Five Star Automatic Fire Prot., L.L.C., cited by the Fifth Circuit in this decision

“FS Blinds has no right ‘to complain that the damages’ determined by the district court inevitably will ‘lack the exactness and precision of measurement that would be possible had [it] kept records in accordance with the [FLSA’s] requirements.'” — Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 22-20095, citing Mt. Clemens, July 12, 2023

This Is Bigger Than Three Workers in Houston

Economic Inequality: The Contractor Trap at Scale

What FS Blinds did to Flores, Romero-Rodriguez, and Villarreal is not an isolated incident. The “independent contractor” misclassification is one of the most widespread wage theft mechanisms in the American economy. It is especially concentrated in industries like construction, installation, delivery, and home services — sectors where the workforce skews working-class, immigrant, and non-white, and where legal resources are scarce and retaliation is real.

When a company labels its workforce as contractors instead of employees, it eliminates not just overtime pay but also employer contributions to Social Security and Medicare, workers’ compensation coverage, unemployment insurance, and in many cases access to employer-sponsored health insurance. The worker absorbs all of those costs themselves — out of the same flat-fee paycheck the company already calculated to minimize. FS Blinds required workers to use their own vehicles and their own tools. Every mile driven, every tank of gas, every worn-out drill bit came out of the workers’ own pockets while FS Blinds kept its overhead lean and its margins fat.

The three workers in this case reported averaging 70-hour workweeks. A standard 40-hour week plus 30 hours of overtime, paid at time-and-a-half, represents a meaningful income difference — the difference between a paycheck that covers the basics and one that builds any margin of safety at all. Multiply that gap across the entire installation workforce at FS Blinds, across the years those workers were employed, and the company’s “contractor” policy quietly transferred a significant amount of money from the people doing the physical labor into the company’s revenue column.

The appeals court cited the principle that the FLSA is a remedial statute encoding “great public policy.” That policy is simple: the people who do the work should be paid for the time they put in. When companies systematically circumvent that through misclassification, they don’t just harm individual workers — they suppress wages across entire labor markets, undercutting competitors who do pay overtime and training an entire industry to treat wage theft as standard operating procedure.

Public Health: What Happens to Bodies That Work 70 Hours a Week

The source document does not include medical records, injury reports, or health data on Flores, Romero-Rodriguez, or Villarreal. What it does include is a factual account of their schedules — and those schedules tell a story that public health research has documented extensively. Workers who regularly log 55 or more hours per week face substantially elevated risks of cardiovascular disease, stroke, mental health deterioration, and workplace accidents driven by fatigue.

Workers like these three men — driving across a major metro in their own vehicles, beginning before sunrise, working physically demanding jobs in active construction sites, finishing after dark — do not exist in an abstract legal or economic space. They exist in bodies that accumulate wear. The flat-fee, no-overtime model gives a company every incentive to pile jobs onto each day’s list, with no mechanism to compensate workers for time spent and no reason to care about fatigue. When the cost of extra hours falls entirely on the worker and none of it falls on the employer, the employer’s incentive is always to assign more.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now: The Fight Isn’t Over and You Have a Role In It

The Case Is Still Active

The Fifth Circuit’s July 2023 ruling reversed the lower court’s dismissal and sent the case back for further proceedings. The workers have cleared one major legal hurdle — proving they worked overtime. The next fight is whether FS Blinds can successfully argue they were contractors rather than employees. That determination will control whether they receive any back pay at all. Watch this case.

Corporate Roles at FS Blinds

• Ownership and Management of FS Blinds, LLC: [REDACTED – Not in Source] — The source document does not name individual executives or owners. The company is identified as FS Blinds, L.L.C., based in Pearland, Texas.
• Decision to Classify Workers as Contractors: Made by company leadership. The classification was not incidental — the court document confirms FS Blinds actively defended it as their legal position.
• Decision to Keep Zero Hour Records: Also a company-level decision. The FLSA obligation was clear. FS Blinds chose not to comply.

Regulatory Watchlist

• U.S. Department of Labor — Wage and Hour Division (WHD): The federal body responsible for enforcing the FLSA, including overtime and recordkeeping requirements. File a complaint at dol.gov/agencies/whd.
• Texas Workforce Commission: State-level agency that handles some wage claims in Texas.
• IRS Worker Classification: Worker misclassification also has tax implications. The IRS operates a Voluntary Classification Settlement Program. Misclassification complaints can be filed at irs.gov.
• National Labor Relations Board (NLRB): Relevant if workers face retaliation for organizing or speaking out about conditions.

The Ground Game Matters

If you are a construction or installation worker in Texas being paid per job with no overtime: your situation may be identical to what Flores, Romero-Rodriguez, and Villarreal faced. Document your hours yourself — every day, in a notes app or a notebook. Contact a worker center in your area. In Houston, organizations like the Workers Defense Project provide legal resources and organizing support to low-wage workers, especially in the construction trades. The law exists. The courts, in this case, enforced it. But enforcement requires workers who come forward, and workers who come forward need community behind them.