Employer never paid overtime for months of late shifts, now denying it happened. Do I have options?
Location: Texas. I left a logistics company about two months ago after 14 months there. For roughly the last five months I was staying late pretty regularly, usually an hour and a half to two hours past my shift, sometimes more. I'm hourly non-exempt so that should have been overtime pay. It never showed up on any of my checks.
My supervisor knew I was staying, I'd text him when I was still there and he'd say things like "we'll make sure it's reflected" or "you're building up serious goodwill". Nothing that said overtime in plain words but enough that I wasn't worried about it at the time. I brought it up twice in person and got told payroll was being worked out. Then I put in my notice, things got weird, and my last check was just my normal hours. I have the texts from my supervisor and I kept some notes on my phone about the late nights, not super detailed but there's a pattern there. The total is probably around 60 to 80 hours of unpaid overtime which adds up to a real amount of money for me. I didn't make a bigger deal of it while I was there because I needed the job and I kept thinking it would get fixed. Now I'm wondering if leaving makes this harder to pursue or if I still have a real case here and where I'd even start