PORTLAND, Maine (Legal Newsline) - A lawyer who taught classes on banking and admiralty law at the University of Maine Law School on the side isn’t entitled to extra pay for the hours he spent preparing for class and grading papers because he was working for a fee, the state’s highest court ruled.
Robert Bocko was an adjunct professor 2019 and 2020 under contracts that paid a fixed fee for each course he taught. In 2019 he earned $1,000 for a one-month course and in 2020 he was paid $4,000 for a three-month course.
In May 2021, Bocko sued the law school for violating Maine labor law requiring wages to be paid at least every 16 days. A trial court dismissed the case, citing exemptions in the law for teachers and salaried employees.
Bocko appealed but Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court upheld the dismissal in a Jan. 25 decision, albeit for a different reason.
The timely payment rule is in Maine’s section 621-A, but another law, Section 623, exempts employees who work on a fee basis and whose annualized pay is at least 3,000 times the minimum wage. The law defines “fee basis” as “payment of an agreed sum for a single job regardless of the time required for its completion.” The job also must be unique and not “repeated an indefinite number of times” for the same amount of money.
By the Maine Supreme Court’s calculation, Bocko earned between $75 and $102 an hour for classroom time, which annualized far exceeded $33,000, or 3,000 times the minimum wage of $11 an hour.
Bocko argued his hourly rate should include his out-of-classroom hours, but the Supreme Court disagreed. The contract only named classroom hours and any other time could only be calculated after the fact.
“There would be no consistency or predictability” for the school, since teachers spend less or more time preparing classes depending on the subject and how many times they’ve taught it before, the court concluded in an opinion by Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill.
Bocko represented himself, with oral arguments by Matthew Wahrer of Thompson Bowie & Hatch. The University of Maine was represented by David Strock and Valerie A. Wright of Littler Mendelson. The Maine Employment Lawyers Association submitted an amicus brief in the case.