“Ultimately the Lehtinens, without admitting liability, agreed to pay $750,000, which covers everything we believed they owed their employees going back two full years, plus an additional amount paid as liquidated damages, plus attorney fees,” said Tim Louris, a lawyer representing the employees from Minneapolis firm Miller O’Brien Jensen.

A federal judge in Minneapolis approved the payment on Thursday. The sum is in addition to $804,000 paid by the company after the lawsuit was filed.

International Union of Operating Engineers Local 49 made the initial allegations early in 2016, though nonunion employees are part of the settlement as well.

“If Local 49 hadn’t discovered the overtime underpayment when it did, employees might never have received this money that they rightfully earned,” Local 49 business manager Glen Johnson said in a statement. “Instead, the employees received over $1.5 million in total back pay in just the last few months, and that money wasn’t lost in the process of Magnetation’s bankruptcy.”

Magnetation, an iron ore processor, filed for bankruptcy in 2015 and last month announced the possible closure of its last operating plant, in Grand Rapids, at the end of this month unless a buyer or other investor is found to keep operations afloat. The company also owns shuttered processing plants in Keewatin and Bovey, and a pellet plant in Reynolds, Ind.

The overtime lawsuit settlement was approved just before another federal judge cleared the way for Magnetation to close the Grand Rapids plant this year and sell off its assets as part of a “global bankruptcy settlement,” according to the Miller O’Brien Jensen law firm.

Matthew Lehtinen, the company’s chief operating officer and son of CEO Larry Lehtinen, did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

One of the lead plaintiffs in the overtime case celebrated the settlement.

“We were really glad to see this case get settled so quickly because most of the employees affected by the lawsuit had been laid off by Magnetation in the last couple of years,” said former Magnetation employee Joe Abeyta. “We shouldn’t have had to wait for our money, but this will help out a lot of former Magnetation employees who still haven’t found work, and I understand that current employees are being paid correctly now.”

The ore reclamation company had more than 520 employees in 2015, 400 of them on the Iron Range and the rest in Indiana.