Roman Oleinik, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
It wasn’t quite instant karma. But two years after paying a worker’s final wages in a wheelbarrow full of oily pennies, an employer learned an expensive wage and hour lesson.
The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to pay covered nonexempt workers overtime pay at a rate not less than one and one-half times the regular rate of pay after 40 hours of work in a workweek. So what happens when employees claim not to receive premium overtime pay despite working more than 40 hours in a workweek? Continue reading
Federal law requires most companies to pay minimum wage and overtime pay for employees unless they qualify for an exemption. Employees generally must meet certain tests regarding their job duties and get a salary of at least $684 per week, which works out to just $35,568 per year.
But a new overtime reform bill introduced earlier this week in both the House and the Senate aims to boost that salary level yearly until 2027 to make it much easier for salaried American workers to be overtime eligible. Continue reading
Those were the critical issues in a precedential decision that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals issued yesterday. So let’s talk about it. Continue reading
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Benoît Prieur, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Fair Labor Standards Act lawsuits aren’t exactly fodder for Silver Screen blockbusters.
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Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
A company operating an offshore oil rig paid one of its “tool pushers” anywhere from $963 to $1,341 per day. His paycheck, issued every two weeks, amounted to his daily rate times the number of days he had worked in the pay period. So if the employee had worked only one day, his paycheck would total (at the range’s low end) $963; but if he had worked all 14 days, his paycheck would come to $13,482. Under that compensation scheme, the company paid the employee over $200,000 annually, with no overtime compensation.
But, the employee who supervised many others and otherwise satisfied the duties tests for the executive exemption under the Fair Labor Standards Act sued for unpaid overtime because, he claimed, the company failed to guarantee him at least $455 per week in salary. Continue reading
I’m hitting this technology theme hard this week. Continue reading
The Fair Labor Standards Act can present a minefield for even the savviest wage-and-hour gurus. Last night, I read a Pennsylvania federal court decision that helps clarify when employers can (and can’t) adjust employee pay rates. Continue reading
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that an investigation into a Japanese restaurant had uncovered violations of federal wage and hour laws, resulting in 75 servers, sushi, and hibachi chefs not receiving all of their legally earned wages.
The final bill was $171,834.
That’s a lot of toro and high-end sake. Continue reading
The Employer Handbook Blog