Goodyear scheduler sues over ‘banked’ overtime at Texarkana tire plant, seeks collective action

TEXARKANA, Ark. – A shift scheduler at Goodyear’s Texarkana tire plant says the company pays its salaried employees for only four of the eight overtime hours their 12-hour rotating schedule produces every two weeks and makes them “pay back” hours when the plant shuts down, according to a proposed collective action filed Monday in federal court.

Christopher Sullivan of Ashdown filed the suit in the Texarkana Division of the Western District of Arkansas under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Arkansas Minimum Wage Act. He is asking the court to let every salaried employee at the plant from the past three years who was treated as exempt from overtime join the case.

Goodyear had not filed a response as of Friday, court records show.

Goodyear bought Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. in June 2021 and took over the plant at 3500 Washington St., which Cooper had operated since 1964, the complaint says. The plant runs around the clock on four crews working 12-hour shifts.

Salaried employees on the plant’s “2-2-3” schedule work three 12-hour shifts one week and four the next, 36 hours and then 48, the suit says. That puts eight hours over the 40-hour threshold in the long week.

Sullivan’s pay record for June 21 through July 4 shows 80 hours of salary, $2,838.58, and four hours of overtime at $53.24 an hour, $212.94, against “Total Hours Worked” of 84, according to the complaint. The next pay period showed 80 hours and no overtime at all.

A company email to salaried employees on the schedule told them to “enter your 4 hours of natural overtime for the bi-weekly period on your scheduled Saturday work day,” the suit says. “The instruction says four. The schedule produces eight.” Federal regulations bar averaging a short week against a long one to avoid overtime, the complaint says.

When Sullivan claimed overtime in July, master scheduler Richard Megason asked him “why are you claiming overtime you didn’t work” and added, “we had someone claiming overtime they didn’t earn and they no longer work here,” according to the complaint.

The suit also describes a “bank” system in which salaried employees who cover open shifts are not paid but accrue hours on a spreadsheet with columns for “OT,” “Owe,” “Sick” and “Vac,” with balances ranging from negative 24 hours to 56 hours. A November 2025 email with the subject line “TIME OWED” told employees that hours they owed “will need to be paid back before the end of the year.”

In a recording described in the complaint, production business leader Bruce Ward explained to salaried employees that picking up a shift to cover a vacation day erased the “natural” four hours, and summed up the system in three words: “there’s no overtime.”

In late July, the suit says, Megason told Sullivan he owed 24 hours of “payback” for days the plant took out of production and a weather shutdown, took eight hours of holiday pay and eight hours of overtime to cover one day, and said Sullivan would “owe 24 more at the end of August.”

The complaint says Sullivan’s duties as a scheduler, assigning swing builders, picking up timecards, preparing the shift efficiency report and sending the manning text, do not meet any overtime exemption, and that docking salaried pay for production shutdowns defeats the guaranteed salary an exemption requires.

Sullivan seeks unpaid overtime for the past three years, an equal amount in liquidated damages, attorney fees and a court-approved notice to other salaried employees. He is represented by Tyler attorney William S. Hommel Jr. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge John Thomas Shepherd. The allegations in a complaint are one side of the case.