• The HR Specialist - Print Newsletter
  • HR Specialist: Employment Law
  • The HR Weekly

Wages & Hours

Workers can’t sign away their rights to overtime

03/17/2022
A California home care agency was ordered last month to pay $315,000 in unpaid overtime to 158 workers. The owner unlawfully required hourly workers to sign an agreement to be paid straight time for each pay period.

1st in 40 years: DOL proposes new Davis-Bacon Act rules

03/17/2022
The Department of Labor has published a notice of proposed rulemaking that for the first time since the 1980s revises rules for administering the Davis-Bacon Act, which governs pay for private-sector employees working on government construction contracts.

How to compete with rising pay expectations

03/10/2022
Target announced at the end of February that it was dramatically raising its minimum wage. Other large companies are also raising pay and benefits to compete for available talent. What does this mean for smaller organizations that can’t afford such lofty pay scales and benefits packages?

One-third of recent job-changers making 30% more

03/08/2022
With new jobs come bigger paychecks for many American workers. A new survey reveals that nearly a third of workers who left their jobs during the pandemic are making at least 30% more in their new roles and almost half are making at least 10% more.

New tipped-worker 30-minute rule challenged

03/03/2022
The Restaurant Law Center has sued the DOL to reverse a new rule requiring tipped workers who spend more than 30 consecutive minutes performing nontipped tasks to receive the full minimum wage for time exceeding 30 minutes.

Beware pay cuts that disadvantage minorities

03/03/2022
Many employees who began working remotely two years ago decided to relocate to areas with low costs of living.  Some employers responded by cutting relocated workers’ pay—not always a popular practice, but somewhat defensible. But that calculus could trigger legal trouble, potentially affecting some protected classes of employees more than others.

3 steps toward pay transparency for new hires

02/17/2022
More employers seeking a recruiting advantage in today’s tight labor market have started advertising exactly how much they’re paying. It might be time for you to try that bold tactic, too.

Never manipulate pay or hours to avoid OT

02/10/2022
Tempted to play loose with the overtime rules to save money on labor? Bad idea. You will attract the Department of Labor’s attention.

DOL wants 100 more wage inspectors

02/08/2022
Look for the Department of Labor to ramp up enforcement in coming months. The DOL announced Feb. 1 that it plans to add 100 investigators to the Wage and Hour Division, bolstering oversight of the Fair Labor Standards Act and other laws that affect compensation.

DOL, NLRB teaming up on wage-and-hour enforcement

02/01/2022
The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division and the National Labor Relations Board have formally agreed to collaborate on an array of information-sharing, investigation and enforcement activities.