The Card Game Bosses Who Stole Overtime From Their Own Referees

The American Contract Bridge League, headquartered with a mission to “promote, grow and sustain the game of bridge,” runs over 3.5 million tables of bridge annually across more than 3,000 clubs and 1,100 tournaments in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Bermuda. Its Tournament Directors — the people who referee games, enforce rules, settle disputes, verify scores, and keep tournaments running — are the human infrastructure that makes every single one of those events possible. ACBL’s own legal record confirms that providing Tournament Directors for bridge tournaments represents the organization’s largest source of revenue besides membership dues.

Despite that, ACBL decided those workers did not deserve time-and-a-half pay for any hour they worked beyond forty in a week. The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires employers to pay overtime at 1.5 times the regular rate for those hours. ACBL’s defense was that its workers qualified for an “administrative exemption” — a legal carve-out for employees whose primary duty involves running the business itself, rather than producing the business’s core product or service.

A federal appeals court issued its ruling on August 14, 2023, finding that ACBL had misclassified multiple categories of workers and that those workers were owed overtime wages they never received. The court also found that ACBL used a procedural trick to try to erase one plaintiff’s claims after he died during the lawsuit.

They Knew in 2014. They Kept Going Anyway.

In 2014, ACBL asked its own legal counsel to evaluate whether Tournament Directors were correctly classified as exempt from overtime. Counsel told ACBL it had a “solid argument” for the exemption. That same year, Peter Marcus — a full-time salaried Tournament Director who had worked for ACBL since 1993 — filed a complaint with the United States Department of Labor. The DOL investigator reviewed the situation and reached a very different conclusion.

The DOL investigator concluded that Tournament Directors “did not supervise employees, did not have any authority to hire, fire, or discipline or make those recommendations, and did not have management as their primary duty.” The investigator found that Marcus personally was owed $3,883.14 ($3,883.14 — roughly what a minimum-wage worker earns in a full month of full-time labor) in unpaid overtime back wages. ACBL’s legal counsel refused to pay. The file was closed without any penalties or enforcement actions against ACBL.

With no penalty attached and no enforcement teeth biting down, ACBL absorbed the DOL’s findings and moved on. It began classifying Tournament Directors as non-exempt in January 2017 — but when it reorganized its Field Operations department in 2018, it created four new positions and immediately classified all of them as exempt. The cycle started again.

What the Settlement Cannot Repay

Peter Marcus gave ACBL twenty-three years of his working life. He joined as a Tournament Director in 1993, climbed to the rank of Associate National Tournament Director by 2001, and by 2011 was running a specialized program called Sectional Tournaments at Clubs, coordinating bridge competitions between players across different physical locations. He was, by any honest reading of the record, one of ACBL’s most experienced people. In June 2015, ACBL promoted him and raised his salary. His annual performance review rated him as consistently meeting and sometimes exceeding expectations. His CEO signed off on it.

Then Marcus applied for Director of Field Operations. He was the only candidate interviewed. The organization’s Human Resources Manager told him the interview had gone well. When he followed up with CEO Robert Hartman, Hartman told him a decision was coming “in the near future.” Marcus waited. He was then told he would not be hired due to unspecified “attitudinal concerns.” Marcus testified under oath that he could not accurately recall the words used, because those concerns were never explained to him clearly or directly. He was not given a reason he could hold in his hands and examine. He was given a brush-off.

Two months later, a complaint about score-posting delays landed on Hartman’s desk, and Marcus resigned on the spot. He testified that he felt there was “no future for him” at ACBL. Eight months after he walked out the door, ACBL hired someone for the Director of Field Operations role. That person had, in the court’s own words, “no previous knowledge of bridge directing or bridge tournaments.” Hartman described this outside hire as bringing “a fresh perspective.” Marcus, who had been inside for over two decades, brought twenty-three years of institutional knowledge. ACBL decided that was worth less than a fresh face with no relevant experience.

Then there is Kenneth Van Cleve. Van Cleve was an opt-in plaintiff, one of the workers who joined the overtime lawsuit because he believed he had been underpaid. He died on July 9, 2019, while the case was still working its way through the courts. His widow, Sarah Van Cleve, sought to step into his place in the lawsuit and continue fighting for what he was owed. ACBL filed a notice of his death into the court record on May 11, 2020. But ACBL did not serve that notice on Sarah Van Cleve directly. Then ACBL turned around and argued that Sarah’s attempt to join the lawsuit was too late, because the ninety-day substitution window had already closed. ACBL tried to use the paperwork death of Kenneth’s claim — a death it triggered by filing the notice — as a procedural weapon against his widow, a woman who had never been formally told that her husband’s legal claim was in danger of expiring. The appeals court reversed that maneuver and ruled in Sarah Van Cleve’s favor. But the fact that ACBL attempted it at all tells you exactly where the organization’s priorities lie.

The workers at the center of this case are referees. They enforced fairness for 162,000 bridge players. They called violations, settled disputes, kept the game honest, and made sure everyone at every table played by the same rules. They did all of this while their employer denied them the basic legal protection that Congress wrote into the Fair Labor Standards Act specifically for people in their position. There is something deeply clarifying about that contrast: the people hired to ensure that the rules of the game were followed were themselves subjected to a system designed to quietly steal from them, one pay period at a time.

Straight From the Court Documents

These are direct quotations from the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, dated August 14, 2023. Every word below is from the official legal record.

“A DOL investigator concluded that ‘tournament directors in the field’ were not exempt because ‘they did not supervise employees, did not have any authority to hire, fire, or discipline or make those recommendations, and did not have management as their primary duty.’ The investigator concluded that Marcus was entitled to $3,883.14 in overtime back wages.” — First Circuit Court of Appeals, August 14, 2023 (Factual Background: Department of Labor Investigation)

“Counsel told the investigator that ACBL would not agree to pay any back wages because it disagreed that overtime was due to full-time salaried Tournament Directors. Counsel also said that ACBL was planning to discontinue the Tournament Director position and assured future compliance. The investigator ‘recommended that the file should be administratively closed.’ The investigation did not result in any monetary penalties or enforcement actions against ACBL.” — First Circuit Court of Appeals, August 14, 2023 (Factual Background: Department of Labor Investigation)

“Providing Tournament Directors for contract bridge tournaments sanctioned by ACBL represents ACBL’s largest source of revenue besides membership dues.” — First Circuit Court of Appeals, August 14, 2023 (Analysis: Tournament Directors)

“In April 2017, ACBL hired another individual as Director of Field Operations. That individual had no previous knowledge of bridge directing or bridge tournaments.” — First Circuit Court of Appeals, August 14, 2023 (Factual Background: Marcus’s Retaliation Claim)

“Where a party files a suggestion of death, it must do so in a manner that puts all interested parties and nonparties on notice of their claims in order to trigger the 90-day window. […] Because ACBL failed to serve Kenneth Van Cleve’s successor with the notice of death, the 90-day period to move to substitute was never triggered. Thus, the district court erred in denying the motion to substitute Sarah Van Cleve.” — First Circuit Court of Appeals, August 14, 2023 (Analysis: Motion to Substitute a Party)

Who Else Gets Hurt When One Employer Steals Wages

Economic Inequality: The Wage Theft Playbook That Never Gets Punished

What ACBL did is not unusual. It is a textbook wage theft playbook: classify workers as exempt, refuse to pay overtime, promise compliance when regulators show up, wait for the investigation to close without penalties, and then reorganize job titles to restart the cycle. The DOL found in 2015 that Marcus was owed back wages. ACBL refused to pay. There were no penalties. The file was closed. Two years later ACBL reclassified Tournament Directors as non-exempt — but only after a lawsuit was filed, and only for that category of workers.

When ACBL reorganized in 2018 and created four new positions, every single one of them was immediately classified as exempt. The appeals court ruled in 2023 that at least two of those classifications — National Tournament Directors and Associate National Tournament Directors — were wrong. That means workers in those roles went years into the lawsuit period still being denied overtime they legally earned. The workers required a full federal lawsuit and a federal appeals court ruling to get what the law already guaranteed them.

This is the economic reality that wage theft creates at scale. When employers successfully deny overtime, workers make less money, save less money, build less retirement security, and have less capacity to weather any financial emergency. The $3,883.14 ($3,883.14 — roughly what a worker earning the 2014 federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour would earn in thirteen full forty-hour weeks) that Marcus was personally owed is not a dramatic figure in corporate terms. But it represents real hours worked, real physical presence at tournaments, real expertise applied to keeping 162,000 members’ games running fairly, and real money that ACBL kept because no one with enforcement authority made them give it back.

The structure of the FLSA’s administrative exemption is supposed to protect lower-level production workers from being swept into an executive classification they do not fit. ACBL’s legal argument essentially claimed that the people doing the core product work — running tournaments — were actually administrators. The federal appeals court was blunt in its rejection: employees who “directly produce the good or service that is the primary output of a business” do not perform administrative work. Tournament Directors, National Tournament Directors, and Associate National Tournament Directors produce the product. They deserved overtime. They did not get it for years.

Economic Inequality: What Happens When the Watchdog Has No Teeth

The Department of Labor investigation opened in 2014, concluded in 2015, and produced zero penalties. ACBL refused to pay the back wages identified. The DOL investigator simply recommended the file be “administratively closed.” This is the enforcement gap that corporations rely on: the DOL investigates, finds a violation, and then lacks the practical power to compel payment when the employer simply says no. The worker is left to file a private lawsuit — which is expensive, slow, and out of reach for most people who cannot find lawyers willing to take cases on contingency.

Marcus filed his lawsuit on June 23, 2017. The appeals court issued its ruling on August 14, 2023. That is six years of litigation to recover wages that a federal investigator had already confirmed were owed in 2015. The financial cost of six years of legal proceedings falls primarily on the workers and their lawyers, not on ACBL. ACBL employed the law firm Littler Mendelson, P.C. — one of the most prominent management-side labor law firms in the United States — to defend itself. Workers fighting for overtime wages are, in almost every case, outgunned from the moment they decide to fight back.

What ACBL Saved By Denying Overtime

What You Can Do With This Information

The appeals court sent this case back to the district court for further proceedings consistent with its August 2023 ruling. That means the fight for overtime wages for National Tournament Directors and Associate National Tournament Directors is ongoing. The court also reversed ACBL’s attempt to cut Kenneth Van Cleve’s widow out of the case, meaning Sarah Van Cleve’s claim proceeds. The people at ACBL who made the decisions to deny overtime, to refuse the DOL’s findings, and to restructure job titles after a federal investigation are not named in the court record beyond CEO Robert Hartman, whose name appears in the retaliation analysis.

Who Should Be Watching This

• Department of Labor (Wage and Hour Division): The federal body that investigated ACBL in 2014–2015, found a violation, and closed the file without penalties. They have jurisdiction over FLSA overtime enforcement and should be pressed to explain why no enforcement action followed their own findings.
• ACBL Chief Executive Officer Robert Hartman: Named in the court record as the CEO who reviewed Marcus’s performance, received his application for Director of Field Operations, and whose knowledge of the DOL complaint was central to the retaliation claim.
• ACBL Human Resources Manager Nancy Rosenbury: Named in the record as the HR contact who communicated with Marcus during his promotion process.
• ACBL Board of Directors: The governing body that sets compensation policy for the organization. Their names are not in the court record; contact ACBL directly to identify current board members.
• National Employment Law Project (NELP): A worker advocacy organization focused specifically on wage theft and FLSA enforcement. They publish resources for workers who believe they have been misclassified.
• Economic Policy Institute Wage Theft Program: Tracks wage theft cases and publishes research on the enforcement gaps that allow cases like this to persist for years.

How to Push Back

If you work in any organization that classifies you as an exempt “administrative” employee, ask your employer to show you in writing how your primary duty qualifies for that exemption under 29 C.F.R. § 541.200. You have the right to that information. Connect with your local worker center or union organizer — not just your individual HR department — because collective action is what forced ACBL into court in the first place. Mutual aid networks, community labor organizations, and worker centers in your city can connect you with legal aid resources if you cannot afford an attorney. The workers in this case were bridge referees. Your industry does not matter. The legal protection is the same.