Suit: Tribune failed to pay overtime to reporters

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Updated: March 20, 2012 8:22AM

The Chicago Tribune failed to pay overtime wages to its TribLocal reporters, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court here.

Carolyn Rusin, who covered news full time for the Tribune between July 2010 and October 2011 in Barrington, Barrington Hills and Palatine, worked more than 40 hours a week but the Chicago Tribune did not pay her or other TribLocal reporters time-and-a-half for all the overtime they did, the suit said.

The action, filed by attorney Douglas M. Werman, says the Tribune “gave plaintiff Rusin a quota of new [sic] stories she was required to write,’’ yet had a “policy” of not paying her and other TribLocal reporters overtime. In 2011, she was paid for five hours of overtime, Werman said.

The lawsuit is being brought as a class action because the Tribune employed more than 40 people as TribLocal reporters within the last three years, according to the suit. Other reporters “have the opportunity to affirmatively join the case,” Werman said.

The suit claims the Tribune was “willful” in flouting the Illinois Minimum Wage Law and the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.

Rusin, whom the lawsuit said covered local news including government and school board meetings, is no longer employed by the Tribune, Werman said. “Regardless of the circumstances with which she separated employment, she’s entitled to all of the wages she should have been properly paid,” he said.

A TribLocal biography said Rusin graduated from Barrington High School and Roger Williams University in Rhode Island and received a master’s degree from Emerson College in Boston. Before TribLocal, she spent several years covering crime in the northwest suburbs for the Tribune, and, before that, she did free-lance work for the paper, according to the biography.

The suit seeks to recoup unpaid overtime, interest on back wages, punitive damages and attorneys’ fees.

A Tribune official declined to comment Saturday.