Worked to the Bone, Paid for 40 Hours: How One Call Claims and TWIA Stripped Overtime from Hurricane Steve Harvey Workers

EvilCorporations.com • Case No. 23-13205, 11th Cir. (Oct. 16, 2025) • 26 min read

Two Companies, Three Workers, and a Hurricane They Were Sent to Clean Up

After Hurricane Harvey tore through the Texas coast in 2017, insurance claims piled up faster than any normal staff could process them. TWIA, a state-created insurer for coastal Texas, turned to One Call Claims to fill the gap. What followed was a working arrangement that looked, walked, and functioned like employment in every practical sense.

• TWIA (Texas Windstorm Insurance Association) is a creature of the Texas legislature, created specifically to provide wind and hail insurance to Texas coastal property owners who cannot get coverage elsewhere. Because it is a statutory entity, it operates under rules that ordinary private insurers do not face.
• One Call Claims (OCC) is an outsourcing company that matches insurance companies with a roster of licensed adjusters. Its entire business model is selling the labor of adjusters to insurers. The workers’ services were, in the court’s words, “the goods that OCC provides.”
• TWIA and OCC had a service agreement. When Harvey hit, TWIA asked OCC for additional adjusters to handle the claims spike. OCC assigned Galarza, Wimberly, and Carpenter to the work.
• The workers were already licensed and experienced before they arrived. Texas required them to hold state licenses to work in this field, and they had prior experience in insurance adjusting. Neither OCC nor TWIA trained them on basic job skills.
• However, TWIA required them to complete a certification process specific to TWIA’s statutory obligations before they could start. Galarza stated that TWIA “trained him on how it wanted him to perform his job functions” and provided a spreadsheet tool to guide his work according to TWIA’s requirements.
• The assignment was described in the contract as “separate and standalone,” for an indefinite duration “determined by TWIA.” In practice, it lasted between one and a half and two years for all three workers.

Label Them “Contractors,” Manage Them Like Employees, and Pocket the Overtime Savings

The FLSA requires employers to pay time-and-a-half for every hour worked beyond 40 in a week. The catch: that protection only applies to “employees,” not independent contractors. Companies have spent decades exploiting this gap by writing “independent contractor” into paperwork while retaining every practical feature of an employment relationship.

• The contract between the workers and OCC explicitly labeled the workers “independent contractor[s].” That label, under established federal law, means nothing on its own. Courts look at how the relationship actually functioned, not what the contract says it was.
• The workers were paid non-negotiable, fixed daily rates ranging from $500 to $1,200 per day. They could not negotiate their rates. They could not earn more through initiative, upselling, or any form of entrepreneurial effort. Their income was entirely determined by the companies.
• The workers had no ability to engage in the kind of independent business behavior that actually distinguishes contractors from employees. They could not, for example, resolve a single insurance claim without first getting approval from TWIA. Their core function was entirely controlled by the company.
• While working for TWIA and OCC, none of the three workers adjusted claims for any other company. Carpenter did leave twice to work for different insurers, but this discontinuity only confirms the pattern: you could work for someone else, but only by ending this relationship entirely.
• By calling the workers contractors, the companies avoided paying overtime premiums on what were, in practice, 10-hour days, six and seven days a week. The court did not calculate the total amount owed; that determination is for the jury.

What a Spreadsheet Cannot Capture: The Human Cost of Being Labeled Something You Are Not

Imagine you are sent to Texas after a hurricane levels entire neighborhoods. Tens of thousands of families are waiting on checks that will determine whether they can repair their homes or not. You are part of the machine that processes those claims. You show up at TWIA’s office at 8 a.m. You leave at 6 p.m. on weekdays. You come in on Saturdays and Sundays too. You wear a TWIA badge. You use a TWIA computer. You use a TWIA email address. Your timesheet goes to TWIA for review. If you are late, you lose a day’s pay. If you want to work on Sunday, you have to ask permission first.

In every practical sense, you are an employee. Your life, for the duration of this assignment, revolves around one company’s schedule, one company’s systems, and one company’s approval chain. You have no sideline business. You are not juggling other clients. You are not negotiating rates on the open market. You are showing up when they tell you, doing what they tell you, and logging off when they say it is okay to stop.

And then the company tells you: you are not an employee. You are a contractor. That means no overtime. All those hours beyond 40 each week? Those are on you. You agreed to it. It says so in the contract.

What the workers say happened next is particularly telling. According to their testimony, at some point, TWIA itself recognized the problem. The company told its workers they would be transitioning to remote work because TWIA was concerned that it was “exerting too much control” over them and was worried about “overtime and lawsuits.” TWIA disputes this account, saying the shift was about cubicle space and worker preference. But if the workers’ account is true, the company knew precisely what it was doing. It understood it had structured the relationship in a way that legally obligated it to pay overtime. Rather than pay what was owed, it restructured the working conditions to create more plausible distance.

This is not a clerical error. This is not a misunderstanding about labor law. If the workers’ account holds up, this is a company that identified its own liability in real time, understood the workers were being harmed by the arrangement, and responded by changing optics rather than conduct. The actual work remained the same. The adjusters were still adjusting the same claims under the same company’s direction. The only thing that changed was the company’s legal exposure.

For Galarza, Wimberly, and Carpenter, the years of unpaid overtime represent real money: wages they earned and were never paid, hours they gave to a company that classified them out of the wage protections Congress wrote into law. They filed a lawsuit in 2020. A district court threw it out without a trial in 2023, agreeing with the companies that the workers were independent contractors. These workers spent years in a federal court system trying to recover wages from work they had already done and already given, only to be told by the first judge that the companies were right to deny them. The appeals court has now said that is wrong, and the case goes back for a jury to decide. But none of that time is refundable. The burden of litigation fell entirely on the workers, not on the companies that held the power and wrote the contracts.

The Court’s Own Words: Six Findings That Gutted the “Contractor” Defense

The Eleventh Circuit’s opinion did not mince language. Here is what the court put on the record, directly from the published ruling (Case No. 23-13205, filed October 16, 2025).

“TWIA told them that they would begin working remotely because TWIA feared it was ‘exerting too much control over [them] and [it was] concerned about overtime and lawsuits.'”

Eleventh Circuit Opinion, Case No. 23-13205, p. 6 (quoting workers’ testimony)

• This is the workers’ account of what TWIA told them. The court noted TWIA disputes it, but the dispute itself is a factual question for a jury, not something a company wins at summary judgment.
• If the jury credits this testimony, it would establish that TWIA’s management understood they were creating overtime liability and chose to restructure the arrangement to avoid paying it rather than comply with the law.
• The court applied the legal standard that on summary judgment, all facts must be read in the light most favorable to the workers. This statement survived that review, meaning it is legally sufficient to put before a jury.

“The record suggests that the companies controlled the workers to the point where they did not stand as separate economic entities who were in business for themselves.”

Eleventh Circuit Opinion, Case No. 23-13205, p. 13

• This is the legal standard for whether control is significant enough to indicate employee status. “Separate economic entity” is the benchmark: could this person realistically be running their own business, or were they integrated into someone else’s?
• The court found the evidence pointed toward integration: TWIA set the schedule, reviewed timesheets, monitored productivity, required pre-approval on claim resolutions, and threatened termination for unauthorized Sunday work.
• This finding addresses Factor 1 of the six-factor test, and the court concluded it favored employee status.

“The companies’ and workers’ relative investments suggest that the workers were employees. Both sides apparently recognized that this work was ‘not a capital intensive endeavor and is accomplished with computers, telephones, and software.’ But the companies generally provided these materials.”

Eleventh Circuit Opinion, Case No. 23-13205, p. 19

• Factor 3 of the test looks at who invested in the tools and equipment. The companies provided computers, phones, email accounts, ID badges, software networks, and applications, the full kit required to do the job.
• Even when workers transitioned to remote work and used personal devices, the companies still owned the necessary software, networks, and accounts. The workers’ personal devices were described as common items most people already own, not specialized business investments.
• The court cited precedent holding that using a home computer for work “involved no investment” where the computer was already purchased for personal use. This directly undercut the companies’ argument that expense-bearing proves independence.

“TWIA hired more workers in response to increased demand. Employers do this all the time. When there is higher demand, they hire more workers. And when the workforce outpaces demand, they lay off those workers.”

Eleventh Circuit Opinion, Case No. 23-13205, p. 22

• The court used this language to address Factor 5, permanency of the relationship. TWIA argued the workers were hired for a temporary hurricane-response assignment. The court said the economic reality of the arrangement looked exactly like hiring employees to meet demand.
• The assignment was for an indefinite duration “determined by TWIA,” not tied to a specific number of claims or a fixed end date. It ran for up to two years. That is not how you structure a one-off contractor engagement.
• This analysis strips away the post-disaster emergency framing and frames the relationship as ordinary demand-based hiring, which is a core feature of employment, not contracting.

“Without the workers’ services, the outsourcing company has nothing to sell and the insurers can’t perform their central function of resolving insurance claims.”

Eleventh Circuit Opinion, Case No. 23-13205, p. 23

• This is Factor 6: whether the workers’ services are integral to the companies’ businesses. The court found this factor “heavily” favored employee status.
• For OCC, the finding is especially stark. OCC’s entire product is the adjusters. The workers are not peripheral service providers; they are the core commodity OCC sells to insurers.
• For TWIA, adjusters are what allow the company to fulfill its statutory mission of processing insurance claims. Without adjusters doing exactly what these workers did, TWIA cannot function as an insurer.

“If a jury could not reasonably find that the workers were economically dependent under these facts, it’s not clear that a professional working from home could ever establish economic dependence under the FLSA.”

Eleventh Circuit Opinion, Case No. 23-13205, p. 24–25

• This is the court’s closing argument in its own ruling, and it carries significant weight. The judges are stating that if these facts do not get workers to a jury, the FLSA’s overtime protections become essentially unreachable for any remote or hybrid worker labeled a contractor.
• It is a warning to the lower courts about how the misclassification defense is being used to erode workplace protections at scale, not just in this case.
• The Eleventh Circuit covers Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. A ruling this direct sets precedent that will affect misclassification cases across that entire region.

This Is Not an Isolated Incident: How Misclassification Erodes the Floor Under Every Working Person

Public Health and Worker Wellbeing

The physical and psychological costs of misclassification are rarely counted in settlements, but they are real and they accumulate.

• The workers in this case logged schedules of up to 10 hours per day, Monday through Sunday, for up to two years. Sustained overwork at that intensity without overtime compensation removes the financial incentive for companies to limit working hours, because excess hours cost them nothing.
• Because the workers were classified as contractors, they bore all costs for their own health insurance, car insurance, and professional licenses. Workers already stretched by long hours and below-overtime wages face compounded financial pressure when they must cover what employment benefits would otherwise provide.
• The FLSA’s overtime requirement was designed in part as a structural disincentive against overwork: make excess labor expensive, and employers will hire more people rather than burn existing workers. Misclassification directly dismantles this mechanism, concentrating overwork on fewer bodies at no additional cost to the company.
• Remote workers subject to productivity monitoring software (which TWIA allegedly deployed to track keystrokes and typing speed) face documented increases in workplace stress and anxiety. The workers in this case describe being tracked in real time while simultaneously being told they were operating as free and independent businesspeople. That cognitive dissonance has a cost that no court has ever quantified.

Economic Inequality

Misclassification is one of the most efficient wealth-transfer mechanisms in the modern American economy. It moves money from workers who earned it to companies that held the power to label them.

• The Economic Policy Institute has estimated that worker misclassification costs employees billions of dollars annually in unpaid overtime, lost benefits, and tax burden shifts. This case illustrates the mechanism at the individual level: workers doing full-time, tightly controlled labor denied the wage floor that the law provides.
• The $500-to-$1,200 daily rates sound substantial in isolation. But daily rates without overtime protection mean a worker who logs 60 hours earns the same as one who logs 40. The value of those extra 20 hours flows entirely to the company.
• Workers classified as independent contractors must pay both the employee and employer portions of Social Security and Medicare taxes (the self-employment tax). In 2024, that is 15.3% of net self-employment income, compared to 7.65% for an employee. Every misclassified worker pays an additional 7.65% tax premium that a properly classified employee would not owe.
• Misclassification disproportionately affects workers in industries with sudden demand spikes, disaster response, gig platforms, and healthcare staffing, because companies use the “temporary” or “project-based” framing to justify contractor labels while the economic reality of the work is indistinguishable from employment.
• The workers here had to fund their own litigation to challenge the classification, bearing years of legal costs and uncertainty that the companies, with institutional legal resources, do not face symmetrically. The asymmetry of resources in misclassification disputes functions as a structural deterrent to workers even pursuing their rights.

Put a Number on It

From Hurricane to Courtroom: A Timeline of the Case