Kenmore

Week Adjourned: 12.2.13 – Electrolux, Kenmore, Frigidaire, ING, FedEx

The week’s top class action lawsuits and settlements. Top class actions include Electrolux washers, ING Annuities, FedEx overcharges.

Top Class Action Lawsuits

Were you out Shopping for Appliances on Black Friday? If so, a federal class action lawsuit has been filed against Electrolux Home Products Inc, over allegations the company marketed and sold defective washing machines.

Filed by plaintiffs Gloria Waters and William Hall, on behalf of themselves and others similarly situated, the lawsuit claims that Electrolux sold front-loading washing machines that are prone to accumulate mold.

The Electrolux lawsuit alleges the manufacturer sold the defective washing machines under brand names including Frigidaire and Kenmore, and that Electrolux knowingly concealed the fact that the washing machines were prone to accumulate mold and mildew which can permeate throughout the consumer’s home and ruin clothes.

The plaintiffs are accusing Electrolux of breaching implied warranties by selling products they allegedly knew were defective, and are seeking an undisclosed amount in damages.

Thinking of Annuities InvestING? If you’re a senior or know a senior—you may be interested to learn that an annuities class action lawsuit has been filed against ING. Filed by Ernest Abbit of California, the lawsuit alleges the financial services firm indexed financial instruments that failed to meet the advertised goals and that company officials failed to properly advise seniors of the risks associated with investing in the annuities.

According to the ING lawsuit, the stated goal of ING indexed annuities, is to provide seniors in various age groups with “protection of principal”, which means reducing the risks of investment while using various investments products aimed at “fueling the value of our annuity” “to build up your retirement savings.” Abbit claims ING failed to back up their claims. Sound familiar?

Abbit alleges in the class action, that he, and others similarly situated, have lost as much as 20 percent of their savings, “on the first day” of investment, due to the lack of information regarding what the product provided. His returns are allegedly a fraction of those an investor would have received by investing in the S&P 500 as a whole, the index his annuity was allegedly designed to mirror. Umm.

Specifically, the lawsuit, The ING Annuity Class Action Lawsuit, entitled Ernest O. Abbit, et al. v. ING USA Annuity and Life Insurance Company, Case No. 13-cv-2310, U.S. District Court, Southern District of California, claims that ING’s the financial instruments are “wolves-in-sheep’s clothing” and that their statements are “opaque.” The lawsuit claims that not only did the instruments fail to return as advertised, but that those investments contained “embedded derivatives” similar to those that led to the financial collapse in 2008. ING indexed annuities were structured, the lawsuit claims, so that the company would benefit from any derivatives income while at the same time putting it senior investors at risk for losses.

According to the class action, in 2005 the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which is the financial services industry’s self-governing body operating as a private monitor, warned that the products Abbit and others were invested in were accompanied by sales material that “do not fully describe the features and risks of the products.” insurance companies allegedly changing their annuity obligations or not being able to meet those obligations are Aviva, Transamerica, The Principal Financial Group, MetLife, Prudential, Guggenheim and Genworth. Variable annuity holders who purchased their annuities in the past three years from those companies may be eligible to file a claim against those companies.

Top Settlements

FedEx to deliver $21.5 million in cash and billing practice changes, ending a consumer fraud class action lawsuit brought against it by business and government agencies.

Granted final approval this week, the FedEx settlement ends the lawsuit brought in 2011 by two law firms, which alleged the world’s largest cargo delivery company overcharged by as much as $3 per package for tens of thousands of packages. Ouch! That could add up.

The plaintiffs, made up of government and business customers, claimed FedEx charged residential rates to destinations including the US Citizenship and Immigration Office in Chicago, a Bank of America Corp. facility in Tampa, Florida, and the Safariland Group body armor company in Jacksonville, Florida.

FedEx has denied the allegations but has agreed to settle. No news there.

The settlement was preliminarily settled in July. FYI—the class period is from August 28, 2008, to July 13, 2011, and involves FedEx customers who used the carrier’s services and didn’t get a full refund for claimed overcharges on residential deliveries.

The case is Manjunath A. Gokare PC v. Federal Express Corp., 11-cv-02131, U.S. District Court, Western District of Tennessee (Memphis).

Ok Folks, That’s all for this week. Happy Shopping till you’re Dropping!

Week Adjourned: 5.11.12 – Overtime Pay, Smoking Dishwasher, Ormat

A wrap up of the week’s top class action lawsuits and settlements for the week ending May 11, 2012. Top stories include unpaid overtime, smoking dishwashers and Ormat green energy.

Top Class Actions

Holy Catfish Batman!—what’s that smoking thing in the kitchen? A defective dishwasher, perhaps? We’ll find out, as a defective products class action lawsuit has been filed against Whirlpool, the manufacturer of Kitchenaid, Sears Kenmore, Maytag and Whirlpool dishwashers, alleging that certain models of dishwashers have a design flaw that can cause the control circuit board to fail. Greg Adams, who filed the defective dishwasher lawsuit, alleges this happened to him.

Adams claims that on December 8, 2011, he started his dishwasher only to smell burning plastic and see smoke coming from his dishwasher, sometime shortly afterward. To stop the dishwasher, he tried to pull on the door handle, but said he burned his hand on the front panel, which had become extremely hot. In the end, Adams was forced to shut the power off, to prevent further catastrophe, and protect his family. (You know this puts a whole new spin on the benefits of take out.)

According to NBCnews.com, research suggests more than 600 people across the country have come forward on kitchenaid.com. Their products were manufactured by whirlpool, which produces Kitchenaid, Sears Kenmore, Maytag and Whirlpool dishwashers. So why no recall? Well, a recall is one of the things the lawsuit seeks to achieve. Why is this so hard?

Unpaid, unhappy and unafraid… drug sales reps from Medimmune Biologics filed an employment class action lawsuit this week, against the drug company alleging unpaid overtime wage and hour violations. Sound familiar? Novo Nordisk, and Merck are also facing unpaid overtime suits by their sales reps. An industry-wide practice perhaps? Possibly. That is the $65 million question—and hinges on the definitions of ‘exempt’ and ‘non-exempt’.

According to the Medimmune wage and hour class action lawsuit, Medimmune Biologics violated California overtime laws by failing to pay drug sales representatives for overtime hours worked. Under California law, companies are required to pay all non-exempt employees overtime compensation whenever the employees work more than eight hours in a day or forty hours in a week.

The primary requirement to satisfy the outside salesperson exemption and thus not pay overtime under California law and the Fair Labor Standards Act is that the sales representatives are actually making sales. In the Medimmune Biologics overtime class action lawsuit, the drug sales representatives allege that they were not actually involved in making sales but rather promoting prescription drugs to physicians, doctors and other specialists. At most, the physicians the sales representatives promote the drugs to can agree to prescribe the medicine to patients as needed, but cannot actually buy the prescription medicine from the sales representatives directly.

Notably, all the pharma sales rep unpaid overtime class action lawsuits allege that the pharmaceutical sales representatives should be paid overtime compensation for working more than eight hour days under the California Labor Code and/or forty hour weeks under the Fair Labor Standards Act based on the contention that the drug sales representatives do not qualify for the outside salesperson exemption because they are not actually making sales. Incidentally, sales reps who filed unpaid overtime class actions against Schering Plough won.

Top Settlements

Green Energy Co. about to Hand Over Some Green? We have a potential settlement in the Ormat Technologies securities class action this week.

So here’s the not-so-skinny skinny:

To anyone who purchased or otherwise acquired Ormat Technologies Inc securities between May 7 2008 and February 24, 2010, inclusive, who incurred damages (the “class”):

You are hereby notified that this Class Action is pending and that a Settlement of it for Three Million One Hundred Thousand Dollars ($3,100,000) has been proposed. A hearing will be held on October 1, 2012, to determine: (i) whether the Settlement and Plan of Allocation should be approved by the Court as fair, reasonable, adequate, and in the best interests of the Class; (ii) whether Co-Lead Counsel’s application for an award of attorneys’ fees and the reimbursement of expenses should be approved; (iii) whether the Court should grant Lead Plaintiffs reimbursement of their reasonable costs and expenses (including lost wages) directly related to their representation of the Class; and (iv) whether the Court should approve the release of Released Claims against any and all Released Persons and dismiss the Litigation with prejudice.

IF YOU ARE A MEMBER OF THE CLASS DESCRIBED ABOVE, YOUR RIGHTS WILL BE AFFECTED AND YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO SHARE IN THE SETTLEMENT FUND.

To participate in the Settlement, you must submit a Proof of Claim no later than September 24, 2012. As more fully described in the Notice, the deadline for submitting objections to the Settlement and requests for exclusions from the Class is September 10, 2012. Further information may be obtained by visiting gcginc.com/cases/ormat.

Got that?

Good. See you at the bar. And—Happy Mother’s Day!

Week Adjourned: 3.5.10

Top Class Actions

New Wash Setting: Extra Sure Beyond Any Doubt Clean. What would you do if your washing machine took eight hours to do one load? Just to put that in perspective, you could to fly to Europe in the same time it would take to wash your sheets—depending on where you live. Ummm…doing the laundry or flying to Paris—that’s a tough one.

But you could only fly to Paris if you could trust that your washer would do the job properly in your absence, and Ms. Riva, who filed a class action against Sears recently, was not feeling the love.

No doubt.

Among the litany of problems both she and her machine were experiencing on washday—or would that be wash week—were a high-pitched squeaking noise, the machine stopping mid-cycle for no apparent reason, and then displaying the rather cryptic message, in washing machine secret code, “F1 or F51″—your guess is as good as anybody’s as to what that means.

Ms. Riva paid $1000 roughly for her new washer in 2006, and Sears issued a recall of the instrument panel in that particular model some time after that. But she didn’t find out about the recall until after she’d paid to have the panel replaced, by Sears, who didn’t mention the recall, but charged her for the replacement because the washer was no longer under warranty.

You know, I’d be suing too. If she wins, maybe she can take a trip to Paris and do her laundry.

Top Settlements

Medical Malpractice in the News… This is a rather tragic cautionary tale about a 47-year old woman who Continue reading “Week Adjourned: 3.5.10”