Imagine you are the personal assistant for the world’s most famous artist, Lady Gaga. You have the opportunity to travel the world, meet famous people and watch your boss hit the button to drop the “ball” in Times Square on New Years Eve. What could be better? Well, apparently, being paid overtime.
Recently, Lady Gaga’s
In a previous post in August, I questioned whether the pharmaceutical companies were losing the exemption battle as it related to pharmaceutical sales representatives and the outside sales exemption. The Supreme Court had declined to review the Second Circuit’s Novartis holding that pharmaceutical sales representatives do not qualify for the outside sales exemption because they
Last week, the U.S. Department of Labor announced a settlement with Hilton Reservations Worldwide, LLC, in which the company agreed to pay $715,507 in minimum wages and overtime pay to 2,645 current and former customer service employees in Texas, Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania. The DOL determined after an audit that the company failed to pay
My last blog entry on travel time only touched on one issue that may arise as we see more employees being asked to take on additional responsibilities and assignments in lieu of hiring new personnel. Indeed, consolidation of jobs or responsibilities can lead to a number of other potential wage and hour issues that can
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about an initiative by the U.S. Department of Labor, IRS and various state agencies to launch a coordinated crack-down on employers who misclassify employees as independent contractors. Recently, a U.S. District Court in Ohio issued a ruling that nicely illustrates the problem of misclassifcation and the potential liabilities
Reading about a recent lawsuit filed against Groupon, I was reminded that even the most cutting edge businesses may not understand the nuances associated with calculating overtime and find themselves a target for running afoul of wage and hour laws. My colleague and fellow blogger, Bill Pokorny, wrote a helpful blog entry last week on
Q. We have a number of non-exempt employees who are nevertheless paid a salary. How do we calculate overtime for these employees?
A. The question above is a positive sign, because if you find yourself asking it you’ve passed the first hurdle of realizing that not all “salaried” employees are exempt from the overtime requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Generally speaking, calculating overtime is a simple affair. Employees must be compensated for hours worked in excess of forty hours in a single workweek at a rate of one and one-half times the employee’s regular hourly rate of pay. The “regular rate” is calculated by dividing an employee’s total non-overtime compensation for the week by the total number of hours worked. For employees who are paid a simple hourly rate, this calculation is simple, as the regular rate is simply the employee’s normally hourly rate of pay.
However, things get trickier when a non-exempt employee is paid a salary. Suppose Chuck is paid a salary of $1000 per week. He works 50 hours in a certain week – 40 hours of straight time, and 10 hours of overtime. To calculate Chuck’s overtime pay, you need one more crucial piece of information: how many hours is the $1000 salary intended to cover? Continue Reading Calculating Overtime for Salaried Employees [Wage & Hour FAQ]
Q. My Company anticipates embarking on a big project this fall that will have extreme importance to the Company’s future and require extra hours at the office. The Company wants to give a little extra pay to employees who work on this important project. A number of these employees are classified as exempt. May the
Recently, another group of pharmaceutical sales representatives successfully demonstrated that they are not exempt from overtime under the FLSA. Kuzinski, et al., v. Schering Corp Focusing on the administrative exemption, the District Court of Connecticut held that the sales representatives’ work was not directly related to Schering’s management or general business operations and they lacked
Has something like this ever happened in your organization? You have a solid non-exempt employee working hard on a project. His supervisor is out of town and unreachable. In the supervisor’s absence, to get the job done, he works a few hours of overtime. When the supervisor gets back, he asks if she will approve