Folks, someday, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) may darken your door to audit your books and records. Perhaps, they’ll find a violation and require you to pay back wages and liquidated damages. If your next steps involve retaliating against employees who cooperate with investigators and…
Articles Posted in Overtime
I’ve got your VIP passes to hear the Department of Labor discuss possible OT changes tonight
Don’t worry. I can get you past the bouncers. The Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division (WHD) previously announced that it is reviewing the minimum wage and overtime rules — specifically, as they relate to exemptions that employers take for bona fide executive, administrative, and professional (EAP) employees under…
Supreme Court to decide if a supervisor making $200K+ per year should get overtime too
Whether a six-figure supervisor is exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act overtime rules is probably not something that’s kept you up at night — unless you pay your employees a lot of money without paying them a salary (e.g., day rates). Or you’re just an FLSA nerd like me.…
176,193 reasons to be careful when trying to limit employee overtime
Last week, I read this press release from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division announcing a six-figure recovery from an employer that “illegally placed a cap on overtime at 16 hours per pay period and paid any overtime beyond 16 hours at straight time rates, a violation…
Even LAW FIRMS commit SIX-FIGURE wage and hour violations, apparently.
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…
How do employees get paid for work performed on the Sunday of Daylight Savings?
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…
Here’s a bonus FLSA tip: don’t threaten the families of employees that complain about their wages
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.…
Avoiding these wage and hour blunders could save your company over a hundred thousand dollars
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…
The feds are suing a company and its owner that paid a former employee’s final paycheck in pennies — about 91,500 of them.
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…
Here’s hoping employers in states like PA paid nonexempt employees for COVID-19 temperature checks at work. Otherwise…
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…