Enterprise Rent-A-Car and the Exploitation of Assistant Managers

TL;DR Summary

A federal case exposed how Enterprise Rent-A-Car and its corporate parent, Enterprise Holdings, systematically denied overtime pay to assistant branch managers across the United States.

The company classified these employees as “exempt” from overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), effectively requiring long hours without lawful compensation. When the company finally reclassified the roles, thousands of employees had already been shortchanged. The resulting lawsuit revealed how procedural delay, corporate legal defenses, and regulatory inertia work together to protect profit over fairness.

What began as a wage-theft complaint grew into a portrait of neoliberal capitalism’s architecture… where delay is strategy, and exploitation is policy.

Readers who stop here will miss the systemic machinery beneath the surface, the layers of deregulation, legal maneuvering, and economic incentives that make wage theft both profitable and routine in America’s corporate landscape. What follows is a detailed account of how one lawsuit captured the anatomy of corporate impunity.

Inside the Allegations: Corporate Misconduct

In 2017, Mamadou Bah, an assistant branch manager at Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Massachusetts, filed a lawsuit alleging that Enterprise Holdings and its Boston subsidiary had failed to pay overtime wages, violating the Fair Labor Standards Act. The claim was straightforward: assistant managers were classified as “exempt,” meaning they were not paid overtime despite working well beyond forty hours a week.

The company later reclassified these positions as non-exempt… an implicit admission that the earlier classification had been wrong. The change came in November 2016, through a company-wide memorandum. For employees like Bah, it was too late. Years of unpaid overtime had already accumulated.

A collective action was filed to include thousands of similarly situated employees nationwide. Yet by the time the case moved through the courts, procedural obstacles and judicial delays had extinguished the claims of most of those workers. The statute of limitations expired before many could even be notified of their rights.

Timeline of Key Events

Regulatory Capture and Loopholes

The Fair Labor Standards Act was designed to protect workers from exploitative hours and unpaid labor. Yet decades of deregulation have hollowed out its enforcement. The Enterprise case revealed a modern twist: wage laws now depend on procedural speed as much as legal substance. The law theoretically protects workers, but bureaucratic inertia often voids those protections in practice.

Enterprise Holdings exploited a system where classification rules are complex, enforcement is weak, and responsibility is diffuse. As a parent company, Enterprise Holdings insulated itself through subsidiary structures like Enterprise Rent-A-Car Company of Boston. When sued, the parent company denied being an “employer” of the affected workers, invoking corporate separateness to avoid liability. This defense succeeded early in the case, narrowing the legal scope and delaying notification to thousands of employees who might have joined the lawsuit.

Under neoliberal capitalism, such corporate structures are not accidents. They are deliberate instruments of risk management, designed to separate profit centers from liability centers. Legal delay becomes a strategic asset, each procedural step another buffer against accountability.

Profit-Maximization at All Costs

Enterprise’s pay practices reflected a clear calculus: squeeze more labor from salaried employees while avoiding overtime costs. Assistant branch managers carried the title of “manager,” but the duties described in court filings aligned with front-line labor, customer service, rental returns, and cleaning cars. These employees were trapped in the gray zone of pseudo-management, a category invented to exploit exemptions in wage law.

The company’s later reclassification (when assistant managers were suddenly deemed non-exempt) showed that the earlier classification was neither accidental nor benign. It was profitable. Every hour of unpaid overtime represented a transfer of value from labor to capital. The reclassification was not a moral awakening; it was a preemptive legal maneuver to contain exposure once risk became visible.

Corporate profit systems reward this behavior. When executive bonuses depend on quarterly margins, labor costs become targets. The FLSA’s limited reach, combined with decades of employer-friendly judicial interpretation, ensures that compliance is often cheaper after violation than before it.

The Economic Fallout

The case never reached a damages phase, but the scale of harm was clear. More than 1,400 assistant managers attempted to join the lawsuit once notice was finally issued. Nearly all were denied relief because the statute of limitations had expired. For each, the lost wages likely amounted to thousands of dollars, collectively representing millions withheld from working families.

The economic fallout extends beyond payroll. Wage theft drains local economies, suppresses consumer spending, and increases reliance on public assistance. When corporations evade wage laws, taxpayers effectively subsidize their profit margins. This redistribution from labor to capital is a defining feature of the neoliberal order.

Exploitation of Workers

The declarations submitted by employees paint a consistent picture. Most had no idea they were entitled to overtime pay. Many worked sixty-hour weeks believing their salaries covered all hours worked. Some testified they were discouraged from “speaking up” or were told by human resources that their pay was lawful. A few described confusion about how exemption status operated, underscoring how the complexity of labor law functions as a corporate shield.

This ignorance was deliberately cultivated. Enterprise Holdings’ corporate hierarchy and training materials reinforced the illusion of managerial status, granting minor supervisory duties while maintaining strict top-down control. Workers carried responsibility without authority, effort without compensation.

Community Impact: Local Lives Undermined

Each assistant manager represented a family dependent on consistent pay. Lost overtime meant missed rent, delayed medical bills, and longer hours away from children. The broader social consequence was exhaustion and economic insecurity disguised as opportunity. In cities across Massachusetts and beyond, Enterprise’s storefronts appeared as stable employers. Behind that façade, the legal record describes a workforce stretched thin by long hours and narrow margins.

The PR Machine: Corporate Spin Tactics

Enterprise Holdings has built a public image centered on “leadership development” and “entrepreneurial opportunity.” Assistant managers were marketed the job as a pathway to executive success, part of a corporate culture celebrating merit and hustle. Yet the reality documented in federal filings reveals a workforce trapped in low-level management roles designed to extract labor under the pretense of promotion.

Corporate communications emphasized “ownership mentality” while enforcing strict quotas and centralized control. Such rhetoric exemplifies a modern form of corporate spin: transforming exploitation into motivation, and wage theft into ambition.

Wealth Disparity and Corporate Greed

Enterprise Holdings is one of the largest privately held companies in the United States, generating billions annually through car rentals and fleet management. Against that backdrop, the unpaid overtime claims of assistant managers amount to a rounding error in corporate accounting. Yet those unpaid hours represent the financial difference between security and precarity for the workers involved.

This asymmetry captures the essence of neoliberal capitalism: wealth accumulates upward, while accountability disperses downward. Executive wealth compounds through the very mechanisms, classification, delay, litigation, that strip workers of their legal rights. The court record, dense with procedural detail, is itself a testament to how wealth buys time, and time erases justice.

Corporate Accountability Fails the Public

The court ultimately dismissed the claims of all 1,462 opt-in plaintiffs. The reason was procedural, not substantive: the statute of limitations expired while the court considered motions and amendments. The judiciary acknowledged that delay occurred but concluded it was not “beyond the plaintiff’s control.” In practice, this meant that Enterprise faced no penalty for years of unpaid overtime.

Such outcomes are common. Under neoliberal legal doctrine, accountability is bounded by formalism. As long as corporations comply with the procedural form of law, the moral content of justice becomes irrelevant. The law becomes a machine for validating the inevitability of corporate victory.

Legal Minimalism: Doing Just Enough to Stay Plausibly Legal

Enterprise’s legal strategy exemplified what might be called compliance theater. The company followed the letter of labor law while violating its intent. When challenged, it relied on procedural defenses, jurisdictional arguments, and the slow churn of litigation to exhaust claimants. This is legal minimalism in action: doing just enough to appear lawful while structuring business practices around evasion.

Such strategies thrive in neoliberal systems, where enforcement agencies are underfunded and courts are slow. The cost of delay falls on workers, while the benefits accrue to employers who can afford elite legal counsel. The Enterprise case thus demonstrates how capitalism’s legal architecture rewards those who weaponize complexity.

How Capitalism Exploits Delay

Time was the decisive factor in this case. Every month of procedural delay narrowed the window for employees to seek relief. By the time the court authorized notice to the class, nearly every claim was already time-barred.

Corporations benefit from the strategic use of time. Each continuance, stay, and motion compounds into practical immunity. The longer the process, the fewer workers remain eligible, the lower the exposure, and the higher the profitability. In capitalist terms, delay becomes a beneficial (for the powerful corporation at least) cost-saving mechanism built into the system itself.

The Language of Legitimacy

The opinion’s language exemplifies how courts neutralize harm through technocratic phrasing. Words like “untimely,” “not diligent,” and “significant delay” replace plain descriptions of exploitation and wage theft. The vocabulary of reasonableness and procedure transforms moral injury into administrative inconvenience. The human experience of exhaustion and loss becomes an issue of “jurisdiction” and “conditional certification.”

This linguistic depersonalization is a defining feature of neoliberal legality. It sustains the appearance of fairness while ensuring outcomes that favor corporate defendants. In such systems, justice becomes a matter of timing, not truth.

This Is the System Working as Intended

The Enterprise case does not represent a failure of the system. It illustrates the system’s design. Wage laws nominally protect workers, but procedural barriers, corporate hierarchies, and legal abstractions ensure that accountability remains elusive. Profit maximization is not an aberration, it is the organizing principle. The law serves as the stage on which this principle is performed, with workers cast as both participants and casualties.

Conclusion

Thousands of assistant branch managers worked long hours believing they were exempt from overtime pay. When the truth emerged, they turned to the law. The law turned them away. The Enterprise litigation shows how modern capitalism converts justice into process, transforming the right to be paid into the privilege of waiting.

What remains is the moral clarity that wages stolen through classification are still wages stolen. No procedural ruling can erase that fact. The assistant managers of Enterprise Rent-A-Car were denied their time twice… first at work, then in court.

Frivolous or Serious Lawsuit?

This was a very serious lawsuit. The evil company’s reclassification of assistant managers confirmed the legitimacy of the underlying complaint. The dismissal rested on unfortunate timing, not merit like what would be needed for this lawsuit to be frivolous. This sadly means that even well-founded claims can die in the machinery of neoliberal justice.