Overtime wages; Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA); “Computer employee” under 29 USC § 213(a)(17); 29 CFR § 541.400; “Primary duty”; § 541.700(a) & (b); “Computer system or program”; Distinguishing Martin v. Indiana MI Power Co; Department of Labor (DOL); Interactive voice response technology (IVR)

Holding that plaintiff-employee (Bennink) was exempt under the FLSA’s computer employee exemption, the court affirmed summary judgment for defendant-employer on his claim for failure to pay him overtime wages in violation of the FLSA. The court held that defendant “met its burden to show that [his] responsibilities were intimately intertwined with the design, development, and documentation of [its] IVR system, making him an exempt computer employee.” The court noted that the statute does not contain “any requirement of a particular degree, level of education, or job title. That textual absence is a meaningful one.” The court focused on “the employee’s ‘primary duty.’” The DOL determines this “by looking for those tasks and responsibilities that are the ‘principal, main, major or most important duty that the employee performs,’ based on ‘the character of the employee’s job as a whole.’” Much of plaintiff’s work revolved around defendant’s “IVR system. Although the statute does not define ‘computer system or program[],’” the court had “little trouble concluding that an IVR system is one. [It] is complex and technical.” Further, many of his responsibilities related to it fell within several of the duties included in “§ 213(a)(17)(B), namely, ‘documentation,’ ‘design,’ and ‘development.’” Among other things, he “extensively documented the IVR system, mapping out where and how [it] routed callers based on their needs.” In addition, his documentation responsibilities “bled over into ‘design’ and ‘development.’” By gathering “inputs and proposing the flow of the IVR, Bennink was designing and developing the system.” The court noted that while “no other circuits have conducted an in-depth analysis of the current version of the exemption, several district courts have similarly distinguished between IT employees who merely follow predetermined steps to resolve technological issues and those who contribute to decisions about how pieces of a system should work together.” Although not all of his “work fell cleanly within the exemption[,]” because his IVR-related responsibilities were so central to his hiring and workload, the court concluded “they were his primary duty.”