Phone Sex Operators Sue for Minimum Wage Violations

GLENDALE, Calif.—The field of "adult entertainment" is pretty wide, but one segment of it that's rarely heard from (unless they're famous) are the women who spend their days and nights answering calls from (usually) horny guys who want to get off by hearing a woman talk sexy in their ears. One company that provides such a service is Tele Pay USA, apparently based in Glendale, which describes itself as a "booking agent" for the women who answer the phone calls the company sends them, and it describes its business as to "negotiate and book engagements" for the (mostly female) actors. Sort of sounds like an agency/client arrangement rather than an employment situation, doesn't it? But according to the lawsuit filed by phone sex operator Anne Cannon on behalf of herself "and all others similarly situated," Tele Pay does nothing of the sort. "There is no negotiation and Tele Pay does not book engagements," Cannon's lawsuit charges. "Plaintiff is an employee of Tele Pay, hired to field calls on its telephone sex chat lines and engage in sexually explicit talk for a fee paid directly to Tele Pay by its customer." Among the things that Tele Pay requires of its operators is that they maintain land-line telephones in their homes, and that they remain in their homes, near a personal computer and land-line phone, for certain periods of time each day in order to field calls from Tele Pay's customers—and that's a big part of the problem. "In a typical week, Plaintiff fields dozens of calls and maintains a weekly call average of 6 minutes per call," the complaint states. "At that pace, Plaintiff is paid at the rate of 10 cents per talk minute, or $6.00 an hour, well below state and federal minimum wage rates. Frequently, when Plaintiff fields the required calls, the length of her calls fall below an average of 6 minutes per call, which drops her hourly rate to 7 cents per minute, further eroding her hourly rate to $4.20 per hour. While Plaintiff and other sex talk workers get paid as little as 7 cents per minute, Defendant charges callers $5.00 per minute." Cannon notes that, as a Florida resident, her minimum wage should be $8.10 per hour—a rate she's never been paid by Tele Pay, which makes about $300 per hour from each of its operators. To make matters worse, when Tele Pay computes its workers' hourly averages, it includes in the equation "prank callers, dropped calls, technical errors, or even silent calls where no caller can be established," as well as "if a call lasts only seconds and is never verified as a legitimate call from a customer seeking Tele Pay's services." The company also uses software that makes it difficult for the operators to track just how many minutes they're owed—and there's no time clock or time sheets to record the times officially, though Cannon alleges that she and others have often been "required to work overtime hours in excess of 40 hours worked per week." And on top of all that, the operators attend online "meetings" convened by Tele Pay, where company personnel "give[] the employees pointers on what to say on calls and how to keep their average up," and order that all calls must be answered by the operator on the first ring "or face termination"—and the company even places "test calls" daily to make sure the operators are doing that. Cannon refers to this as "micro-managing." In any case, Cannon claims that much of that regimen is against the law; specifically, it's in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, with she and her fellow "classmates" being described by the company for legal purposes as "independent contractors," and with the company failing to "maintain a complete, accurate, and contemporaneous record of the number of hours worked per work week ... as required by law," and also "failing to pay them overtime premiums for all hours worked in excess of 40 hours each work week." And considering how many phone sex operators the company has working for them, that could add up to one pretty penny. Basically, Cannon's lawsuit seeks back pay for the hours and overtime hours each operator has worked from a date roughly three years prior to the date suit was filed (June 27) and up until the case goes to trial—and, of course, attorney fees and costs incurred in prosecuting the lawsuit. A copy of the complaint can be found here. At press time, Tele Pay USA, which was directed by the Court to respond to the complaint within 21 days of the date the court informed it that it had been sued (July 3), has not done so—and we can't help but wonder if part of the reason for that is that the company's registered agent for receipt of legal papers is Legalzoom.com of Glendale.