This is scary.

You’d think a person with “Manager” in her job title who was making more than $89,000 a year would be exempt from the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Not necessarily.

A federal judge in Maine ruled that Bottomline Technologies, Inc., a financial processing services company, will have to face a jury trial on the wage-and-hour claims of Debra* Colello, a former client relations manager for the company. The court ruled that there were disputed facts regarding whether Ms. Colello exercised enough “discretion and independent judgment” in her job to qualify for the administrative exemption under the FLSA. Among other things, although she made recommendations about handling customer issues, her recommendations were never adopted and may even have been mere “perfunctory requests that Bottomline sometimes discouraged.”

You think it’s bad now? Just wait until July, when the U.S. Department of Labor issues its Final Rule on FLSA exemptions. Yikes!

*The plaintiff’s first name in the court papers is “Deborah,” but her LinkedIn page spells her first name “Debra.” I figure Ms. Colello ought to know how to spell her own first name, so I’m going with the LinkedIn spelling.