FLSA

Time on your side: Learn FLSA ’rounding rule’

10/20/2009

The FLSA allows employers to round off an hourly employee’s arrival or departure time to the nearest five minutes, tenth of an hour or quarter of an hour. But your rounding practices can’t always favor the employer. Rounding must be neutral or it must favor the employee. That means if you round down, you must also round up. You have several ways to make rounding fair:

Consider specific circumstances when weighing whether to pay for before- or after-work time

10/20/2009

These days, class-action claims for unpaid work time are becoming common—and can get very expensive. That’s one reason to make absolutely sure you properly pay employees for the work they do. Take a careful look at your hourly employees’ workdays—when they start and when they’re done for the day.

Bonuses advanced and then rescinded: Does that threaten MFLSA exempt status?

10/15/2009

Q. Our bonus plan states that employees eligible to receive bonus pay will receive bonus advances with each paycheck based on year-to-date performance results. Last year, we were on track to meet the maximum bonus throughout most of the year, but the last few months of the year were slow and we didn’t meet our target goal. As a result, we deducted certain amounts from the last few paychecks of salaried employees. Do these deductions threaten the exempt status of the salaried employees?

Regularly review exempt status to avoid FLSA ‘job creep’

10/13/2009

Employees who don’t fit into one of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s exemption categories are entitled to overtime pay. Their job titles don’t matter. What counts are actual job duties. Those duties, of course, change over time. That’s why it’s important to review exempt status regularly—ideally, every time you update a job description.

Home health aide who challenged FLSA exemption dies

10/09/2009

Evelyn Coke, the Queens home health care aide who took her fight against U.S. Department of Labor overtime regulations all the way to the Supreme Court, has died at age 74.

Do you round off employee hours? Be sure to round both up and down

10/05/2009

Employers that round off the time on employees’ time sheets must do so in a way that doesn’t cheat hourly employees out of pay in the long run. That means that if you round down, you must also round up. Otherwise, your time records won’t reflect all hours worked, leading to potential violations of overtime and other wage-and-hour laws.

DOL investigation reveals OT violations in San Angelo

10/05/2009

On Sept. 4, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that a San Angelo geological services company has paid $270,950 in overtime back wages to 70 current and former employees. According to Cynthia Watson, the Wage and Hour Division’s Southwest regional administrator, “Some employees worked as many as 85 hours in a workweek without receiving overtime wages.”

Austin grocer pays $186,624 for wage-and-hour violations

10/02/2009

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division recently announced that MT Supermarket, an Austin grocery store, has paid $186,624 in back wages to 34 workers. The payment comes after an investigation of the Asian grocery store found violations of the FLSA.

Must we pay employees to change their clothes?

09/23/2009

Q. Do we have to pay employees for the time they spend changing into their uniforms before work and out of their uniforms afterward? We’re a hospital and our operating-room personnel must change clothes.

FLSA lawsuit cocktail: Hourly staff mixing work, lunch

09/18/2009

When is your most diligent worker also your biggest lawsuit risk? Answer: When that nonexempt employee works through his or her lunch break or during other off-the-clock hours—a fact nobody realizes (or turns a blind eye to) until he or she sues for unpaid overtime.