Wage and Hour Defense Blog

by Michael Kun

It has not received much publicity -- yet -- but Representative Alan Grayson of Florida has introduced the Paid Vacation Act, a proposed amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In short, if passed, the Paid Vacation Act would require employers with 100 or more employees to provide one week of paid vacation each year to each of its employees who had worked for 25 weeks or 1,250 hours. Three years after passage, the Act would require those employers to provide two weeks of paid vacation, and smaller employers (those with more than 50 employees) would have to provide one week of ...

 By Michael Kun

     The wage hour class action epidemic that has plagued California employers for the last decade or so appears to have no end.

    If anyone tells you otherwise, they are not paying enough attention. 

    And if they tell you the California Supreme Court is about to put an end to the epidemic, they are mistaken about that, too. 

    The California Supreme Court couldn't put an end to it even if it wanted to, at least not with the issues now before it.  And who is to say that they want to do that anyway?

    As in recent years, employers and their counsel are awaiting several important rulings from the ...

by Michael Kun and Kathryn McGuigan

In recent years, the alleged misclassification of employees under California's wage and hour laws has been a hotly contested issue and the subject of a great many class actions. Faced with several appeals pending before it, the Ninth Circuit has now sought guidance from the California Supreme Court on the outside salesperson and administrative exemption tests as they apply to pharmaceutical sales representatives. Such guidance should prove invaluable to employers in the industry, and to parties to these claims.

In D’Este v. Bayer ...

One of the issues that repeatedly rears its head in wage and hour litigation and Department of Labor investigations is whether employees are being compensated properly for meal periods.  One practice that is almost always controversial, in this regard, is the automatic payroll deduction for lunch.

Absent thorough policies and safeguards to prevent inaccurate timekeeping, the automatic deduction is a significant legal risk that should be used with extreme caution.  The reason -- it is too easy for employees to claim they have been asked to work through lunch, or that they can not ...