Abbott Laboratories’ pharmaceutical sales representatives are exempt from state and federal overtime law, a federal judge ruled, compounding the split among courts on the issue of overtime pay for such workers. The Illinois-based Abbott correctly paid the reps as overtime-exempt administrative employees because they engage in considerable “business planning” activities, U.S. District Judge C. Darnell Jones said last week. In the past two years other federal courts in the 3rd Circuit have applied the same so-called “administrative exemption” to sales reps in overtime cases against Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Alpharm.
