Yes, even lawyers can misclassify non-exempt employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. What happened? According to this U.S. Department of Labor press release, a Detroit law firm paid its administrative and support staff workers a salary for all hours worked but failed to pay at least 36 workers the…
For those of you with businesses in Hawaii, most of Arizona, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa, you can skip today’s post, and I’ll see you tomorrow. As for the rest of you, let’s talk about how to pay graveyard shift employees who…
Perhaps you didn’t study this for your SHRM-CP Certification – or even the bar exam. So I’m here to confirm that federal judges frown on employers threatening the families of employees cooperating in a Wage and Hour Division investigation or otherwise exercising their rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act.…
Last night on the U.S. Department of Labor’s website, I spent some time checking out some of the latest news releases from the Wage and Hour Division. Oh, hold on one second. I need to take this call. “Yes?” “Eric, it’s ‘1996 Eric.'” “Who?” “It’s you, err, me, from like…
Roman Oleinik, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons If this isn’t karma, friends, I don’t know what is. Hold for a sec. Before blogging about the height of passive-aggressive behavior backfiring, let me click “refresh” on the Supreme Court’s website to see if we have a decision in the OSHA…
Image by S K from Pixabay Technically, Pennsylvania is a Commonwealth. But that’s not really the point of this post. So, I’ll digress. I tend to overuse the phrase “your mileage may vary” on this blog. Often, I use it when comparing the laws of different states. But, I also…
Image Credit: Photofunia.com Let’s face it. Unlike its neighbor, New Jersey, a/k/a the California of the East, not many would label the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania an employee-friendly state. There’s no state-level FMLA, the whistleblower law is basically limited to public sector employers, and the Commonwealth’s anti-discrimination laws essentially mimic federal…
limbo by Gan Khoon Lay from the Noun Project I still get a kick out of people using the term “salary exempt,” as in, we pay that employee a salary, so s/he isn’t eligible for overtime. Under the Fair Labor Standard Act, a salary is just one of several components…
Image by analogicus from Pixabay Common sense dictates that, as human beings, we refrain from certain activities. For example, neither cuddling with a porcupine nor housebreaking a skunk are good ideas. You don’t need a lawyer to tell you that. As an attorney, when my clients come to me for…
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Several members of Congress have asked new Secretary of Labor Martin J. Walsh to require American businesses to pay overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act to anyone making less than $1,591 per week (equivalent to $82,732 per year for a full-year worker) who…