How Enterprise Built a System That Didn’t Pay Overtime

Enterprise Rent-A-Car Company of Boston, LLC and its parent company Enterprise Holdings, Inc. (EHI) classified assistant branch managers as “exempt” from overtime requirements under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). That classification meant that no matter how many hours those workers put in beyond the standard 40-hour week, Enterprise owed them nothing extra. The company held that position until November 27, 2016, when it reclassified those workers as non-exempt — a quiet admission that the old classification had a problem.

Mamadou Bah, one of those assistant branch managers, worked at various Enterprise Boston locations from May 2014 through January 2017. He received a memorandum on November 9, 2016 informing him that his position would be reclassified. His last allegedly unlawful paycheck arrived on December 2, 2016. On December 21, 2017, he filed a federal lawsuit alleging Enterprise violated the FLSA by failing to pay overtime wages prior to November 27, 2016.

Bah filed his lawsuit on behalf of himself and “all other similarly situated” assistant branch managers — meaning every worker across the country in the same position who had been shorted the same pay. That’s the mechanism the FLSA provides for collective wage actions. What happened next is a years-long legal catastrophe that ultimately cost over a thousand workers their shot at justice.

The Clock Was Already Running Against the Workers

Under the FLSA, workers have two years to file a claim from the date of a wage violation, or three years if the violation was willful. Crucially, in FLSA collective actions, the statute of limitations keeps ticking for every potential claimant individually until the moment they formally opt in to the lawsuit. This is different from a standard class action, where filing the original complaint stops the clock for everyone in the class.

That structural difference is central to everything that followed. The December 2016 paychecks — the last ones that allegedly shorted workers — set the outer clock. For a non-willful violation, claims expired by roughly December 2018 or January 2019. For a willful violation, by January 2020. Workers who had no idea this lawsuit even existed had no way to stop that clock from expiring on them.

What It Costs When a Company Tells You That You Don’t Count

The court filing contains a data point that deserves to be read slowly: 1,192 workers — more than a thousand individual people — signed declarations stating that before receiving a court-issued notice on July 26, 2022, they had no idea this lawsuit existed. They did not know they potentially had a claim. They did not know their rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The only reason they found out at all was because a piece of legal paperwork arrived and told them.

That is not the story of workers who didn’t care about being shorted. That is the story of workers who were never given the tools to know they were being shorted in the first place. Enterprise classified their positions as “exempt” from overtime — a legal category that sounds neutral but functions as a wall. Workers on the wrong side of that wall simply don’t see the overtime line on their paycheck because it was never there to begin with. You can’t fight a theft you don’t know is happening.

HR Told Them Not to Worry. The Clock Ran Out.

One worker stated plainly in their sworn affidavit that HR and leadership framed the situation as a feature, not a problem: they were “base salary plus bonus” employees. That framing, whether deliberate or not, had the practical effect of closing off the very question workers needed to be asking. When your employer’s own internal communications tell you the arrangement is normal, the idea of filing a federal wage claim does not enter your mind. By the time someone else’s paperwork corrected that understanding, the statute of limitations had already expired — completely, for every single opt-in worker.

Another worker described a climate where speaking up felt impossible. The declaration stated only that “it was difficult to speak up” about the wage violations. That sentence contains a universe of workplace reality that the legal record doesn’t fully illuminate: the one-on-one power imbalance between a worker and a corporation the size of Enterprise Holdings, the quiet calculations workers make about what complaining costs them, the awareness that you need the job more than the job needs you. No court ever had to reckon with that calculation, because the clock ran out first.

A third worker captured the full extent of the information gap in plain language: “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 did not simply forget to file a claim. This is a person who lacked the legal vocabulary to know the question existed. The FLSA’s collective action mechanism is supposed to fix exactly this kind of power imbalance — it is the mechanism by which one informed worker’s lawsuit can notify thousands of uninformed ones. In this case, the mechanism worked as designed, but arrived four years too late to actually help.

The fourth affiant who explained the delay invoked “extraordinary circumstances” without elaborating further. The court record does not tell us what those circumstances were. We do not know if that person was dealing with illness, housing instability, family crisis, or some other dimension of precarity that makes federal overtime litigation a distant priority. The phrase sits in the record unexamined, another human story that the procedural machinery of the law processed and discarded because it didn’t meet the legal standard for “extraordinary.”

Straight From the Court Record: The Words That Buried 1,462 Claims

These are direct citations from the court filing. Not paraphrased. Not softened. This is what the official record says.

“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.” — Template declaration signed by 1,192 opt-in plaintiffs. Court filing, Case No. 24-1126.

“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.” — Individual affidavit submitted by one of six opt-in plaintiffs who provided additional testimony. Court filing, Case No. 24-1126.

“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.” — Individual affidavit, one of six opt-in plaintiffs. Court filing, Case No. 24-1126.

“As 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.” — District Court’s conclusion, as cited in the First Circuit’s opinion. Court filing, Case No. 24-1126.

“The District Court concluded that ‘Bah’s proposed approach would make equitable tolling common and disrupt the balance struck by Congress in enacting the FLSA,’ given the ‘unusual’ nature of ‘FLSA class actions’ in that ‘the statute of limitations continues to run against each putative plaintiff until he or she opts in.'” — First Circuit Court of Appeals, describing the District Court’s reasoning. Court filing, Case No. 24-1126.

This Was Never Just One Case

Economic Inequality: The Wages That Vanished Into the Balance Sheet

The FLSA’s overtime protections exist specifically because Congress recognized that workers in low-to-middle income positions lack the individual bargaining power to negotiate fair compensation on their own. Assistant branch managers are supervisory-adjacent roles, but they are fundamentally hourly service workers in the rental car industry — people managing day-to-day operations at individual branches, not executives setting corporate policy. Classifying them as overtime-exempt placed them in a legal category designed for genuine executives and professionals, not workers logging long shifts at rental counters.

The source material does not specify the exact dollar amount of unpaid overtime each worker lost. What it does specify is the structure that produced the loss: a nationwide corporate classification decision, made at the parent company level, that affected every assistant branch manager across the United States before November 27, 2016. When EHI reclassified those workers as non-exempt, it implicitly acknowledged that the prior arrangement was indefensible. But acknowledgment in 2016 does not retroactively pay back the wages workers lost before that date.

The collective action mechanism the FLSA provides is the primary tool workers in low-wage and medium-wage industries have to recover stolen wages when the amounts individually are too small to make individual litigation economically viable. The outcome of this case — where over 1,400 workers were told their claims had expired before they even knew a lawsuit existed — represents the precise failure mode that collective action law was supposed to prevent. When that mechanism fails, the economic harm is distributed across hundreds of individual workers in ways that never appear on any single balance sheet but accumulate into substantial transfers of wealth from workers to corporations.

Public Health: The Hidden Toll of Wage Suppression

The source material does not contain direct evidence of physical health outcomes tied to this specific wage suppression. What it does document is the kind of financial precarity that public health research consistently links to stress-related illness, deferred medical care, and chronic economic anxiety. Workers who are misclassified and underpaid are workers who have less money for rent, groceries, medical bills, and emergencies. That isn’t abstract. It is the lived mathematics of a paycheck that is smaller than it should be.

One worker’s declaration described being unable to bring their claim “because of extraordinary circumstances.” The record does not clarify what those circumstances were. But extraordinary circumstances in the lives of hourly workers frequently mean illness, caregiving responsibilities, housing instability, or the simple overwhelming pressure of surviving month to month. Corporations benefit from that precarity: workers too overwhelmed to pursue legal claims are workers whose wage theft becomes permanent. The statute of limitations is a legal technicality. The exhaustion that keeps workers from filing before it runs out is a product of the same economic conditions that wage theft creates.

What 1,462 Workers Are Worth to a Trillion-Dollar Industry

The Executives Are Still Running the Company. Here’s What You Can Do.

The appeals court affirmed the dismissal in June 2025. The named plaintiff Mamadou Bah’s individual claim against Enterprise Boston remains alive — the court’s ruling addressed only the opt-in workers’ FLSA claims. But for 1,462 workers, the federal courthouse door is closed.

Names and Roles in the Corporate Structure

Enterprise Holdings, Inc. is named as the parent company and defendant. Enterprise Rent-A-Car Company of Boston, LLC is named as the operating subsidiary and defendant. Dwayne Walker is identified in the complaint as the person who sent the November 9, 2016 reclassification memorandum and is described as being “employed at Enterprise Holdings in Glencoe, Missouri.” No current board members or executives are named in the source document; see Enterprise Holdings’ current corporate disclosures for current leadership.

Organize. Don’t Wait for the Clock.

If you work in any industry where your employer classifies your role as “exempt” from overtime and you suspect that classification is wrong, the single most important thing you can do is talk to a wage and hour attorney before the statute of limitations expires on your specific situation. The FLSA’s two-to-three-year window is not forgiving, and as this case proves, waiting for a collective action to find you is a gamble with your own money. Local worker centers, legal aid societies, and labor unions offer free consultations. Find yours. Your coworkers’ wages may depend on someone acting first.