Wage and Hour Defense Blog

By Matthew Sorensen

Wage garnishment can pose a number of potential problems for hospitality businesses. This is particularly true where the employee whose pay is subject to garnishment receives tips. 

Garnishment is a legal procedure in which an employee’s earnings must be withheld by an employer for the payment of a debt under a court order. When faced with a garnishment order involving a tipped employee, the employer must determine whether all or part of the employee’s tips must be included in the amounts withheld under the garnishment order. This question turns on ...

Wage and hour investigations and class action lawsuits continue to be a potentially serious problem for many employers, resulting in an abundance of new cases filed and many large settlements procured.  In addition, in September 2011, under the guidance of the Obama Administration, the Department of Labor and IRS announced an effort to coordinate with each other to address misclassification of employees as independent contractors, which is resulting in additional investigations, fines, and/or legal liability levied on an employer.

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By Amy Traub and Desiree Busching

Like the fashions in the magazines on which they work and the blockbuster movies for which they assist in production, unpaid interns are becoming one of the newest, hottest trends— the new “it” in class action litigation. As we previously advised, there has been an increased focus on unpaid interns in the legal arena, as evidenced by complaints filed by former unpaid interns in September 2011 against Fox Searchlight Pictures, Inc. and in February 2012 against Hearst Corporation. In those lawsuits, unpaid interns working on the hit ...

Wage Hour laws and regulations are complex, non-intuitive, and constantly changing.  Mistakes in wage and salary administration have led to class actions resulting in six and seven figure recoveries against the most sophisticated employers - banks and major industrial giants as well as smaller employers without in-house legal and high level Human Resources officials.  Peter M. Panken, Lauri Rasnick and Douglas Weiner in our New York Office have recently authored an article in conjunction with a major national Continuing Legal Education program in Washington entitled: “ ...

By:  Kara M. Maciel and Casey Cosentino

We were recently asked by a client to provide guidance on the wage and hour issues associated with company-provided on-line training programs for non-exempt employees.  Questions were raised as to when the training is "voluntary" and whether the time must be compensated if the training is completed at home using a personal computer.  The answer stems from federal wage and hour law, which provides that such time is likely compensable for non-exempt employees.     

The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to ...