A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York recently became the latest judge to decertify an FLSA collective action based upon an automatic meal deduction policy. The case, Desilva v. North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, Inc., was brought by a group of employees who worked at several different facilities operated by the health system. The plaintiffs claimed the employer’s alleged practice of automatically deducting 30 minutes per shift from each employee’s pay for meal periods violated the FLSA and parallel provisions of the New York Labor Law. The matter was conditionally certified as a collective action, including: “hourly employees involved in direct patient care responsibility whose scheduled hours include a deduction for an unpaid meal break and who would have had to report performing work during meal breaks in order to be paid for such work.”  More than 1,000 employees filed opt-in consent forms and joined the litigation as party plaintiffs. Continue reading this entry at Littler's Wage & Hour Counsel.