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“They have a job title like relationship manager or personal banker, and they greet you, try to get you to open account,” said Justin Swartz, a partner at the firm Outten & Golden. “They’re not managers at all.”

Mr. Swartz, who estimated that he had helped bring more than two dozen overtime cases against banks, said some involved a so-called branch manager inside a big-box store who was the only bank employee on site and largely performed the duties of a teller.

The practice appears to have become more difficult to root out in recent years, as more employers have required workers to sign contracts with mandatory arbitration clauses that preclude lawsuits.

Outten & Golden LLP managing partner Adam T. Klein, an employee-side attorney and an expert in discrimination class actions, agreed that it's still nearly impossible for job seekers to know if they've been evaluated using AI.

"People simply don't know, as a general rule, that they were exposed to an automated hiring process," Klein said. "It's commonly used, but it's hard to detect."

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Employers cannot evade the law's reach by saying that a job opportunity is open to all except remote applicants in Colorado, said Shira Gelfand, an attorney with worker-side firm Outten & Golden LLP.

"What we learned from Colorado is that it's really unlikely that this tactic of simply closing off hiring for remote workers in pay transparency jurisdictions will work," she said. "Pay transparency, as I said, ... is a growing trend, and it's going to continue and employers need to face that fact."

Today, Adam Klein testified at an U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) public hearing on using artificial intelligence (AI) and other automated systems in employment decisions. During the hearing, Mr. Klein and other panelists discussed the increasing use of AI in the workplace for hiring decisions and its impact on civil rights. Mr. Klein made several recommendations to the EEOC, including calling for an inter-agency collaboration focused on the technical aspects of this emerging technology in the workplace and the potential for bias.

A New Jersey federal judge deemed timely a proposed class action alleging Walmart unlawfully discriminates against applicants with criminal backgrounds through broad screenings that don't consider evidence of rehabilitation, applying a six-year statute of limitations rather than the two-year limitation suggested by Walmart.

A Chinese-American former employee of Lockheed Martin Corp. is suing the aerospace firm, alleging he was forced to resign from his aeronautical engineering job in Palmdale in 2021 as a result of discrimination stemming in part from the fallout of former President Trump’s “China Initiative.”

Jahan Sagafi of Outten & Golden LLP, also a worker-side attorney, said it makes sense for a wider swath of workers to be able to bring their claims against a single employer together.

"Many companies have a nationwide or multi-state presence, and typically the violations that they perpetrate against their employees are fairly uniform across the country," Sagafi said. "It's certainly economically rational and makes sense from the access to justice perspective and judicial economy perspective to have the case cover all the workers who are subject to the same violations."