A worker at Ford Motor Co.'s joint-venture battery plant in Kentucky is suing over unpaid time spent putting on mandatory "protective footwear" before and after shifts.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court, seeks overtime pay for the amount of time it takes workers to put on the company-issued footgear necessary "to perform their jobs in a sanitary environment" at the BlueOval SK factory in Glendale, Kentucky, according to a court filing.

The lawsuit claims that workers must walk "hundreds of yards" to their assigned work location after putting on proper footwear before they can officially clock in for work.

Lawyers for plaintiff Bobby McKnight, a Glendale employee, asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan for a jury trial and to certify the lawsuit as a class-action suit on behalf of all workers at the plant.

"Plaintiff and those similarly situated are not paid for the considerable time it takes them to walk out of the large facility and proceed to an assigned location where they must doff (take off) their foot gear," McKnight's lawyers wrote in the suit.

The BlueOval SK plant is a joint-venture between Ford Motor Co. and South Korean battery maker SK On. Factory workers make batteries for Ford electric vehicles using SK technology. Production at the plant started about a month ago.

Detroit News requests for comment to Ford and BlueOval SK were not immediately returned Thursday.

The lawsuit comes amid some tension between BlueOval SK and workers at the Glendale plant, where the United Auto Workers last month claimed a narrow victory in an organizing vote for employees. BlueOval did not immediately recognize the union amid a dispute over whether 41 ballots should be included in the count. It is now up to the National Labor Relations Board to review the vote.

The UAW is not a party in the footwear lawsuit.

Collective bargaining efforts are being closely watched as more manufacturers open plants in the South, where Republican-passed laws tend to be less union-friendly than in longtime union strongholds in the North and Midwest.

Workers at Ultium Cells LLC near Lordstown, Ohio, last year joined the UAW, and General Motors Co. agreed it would lease workers to that joint venture with Korean battery partner LG Energy Solution to include them under its master agreement. Workers at Ultium's Spring Hill, Tennessee plant joined the union months later.

A majority of employees at Kokomo, Indiana's StarPlus Energy battery plant, the joint venture between Stellantis NV and Korean partner Samsung SDI, signed authorization cards to join the UAW in May.

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