what are my options to try and recover wages that were fraudulently not paid by my former employer DirecTV for a period of about 70 weeks in 2008-2010

Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act,  an employer is required to compensate an employee for all the time that the employee works, regardless of whether the employer approved of the work or not. In the facts that you include it seems that the employer expected you to do the work and not claim it. If the employer has time records that indicate that you worked more than 40 hours during a 7 day pay period, those records can be used to claim the pay for the hours at the rate of 150% of your "regular rate of pay. If you are paid on a piece rate basis, you divide your pay for the 7 day pay period by the number of hours that you worked to get what your "regular hourly rate" of pay is. Then you multiply that by 1.5 (150%), then you multiply that by the number of hours you worked over 40 hours in the pay period.  That's the amount you should have been paid.  If you sue your employer in federal court you can win that amount multiplied by 2 (with the additional amount being considered "liquidated damages" ). There is no reason for you not to get a lawyer to represent you in this because if he wins your case, his fees have to be paid by the employer, not you.  Oregon also has its own state minimum wage laws. If they require more pay than the federal laws would get for you, you can also include state law claims for the additional amount. We litigate a great number of these cases. They are quite lucrative for the employee and his lawyer. They are quite expensive for the employer too. The employer may not retaliate against you for filing a suit. If it does, you can recover additional damages for retaliation. In one case that we litigated the back pay liability at the time we asked the employer to simply pay the overtime that was due to the employees would have cost the employer only $3000, plus less than $1000 of attorneys fees. When the case was concluded (3 years later) it had cost the employer (a city government) over $250,000. This is one reason why we don't settle these cases for less than 100% of what is owed to the employee (including liquidated damages). You should contact a wage-hour lawyer. Michael Caldwell 404-979-3150