1. Introduction
If you have hourly employees that earn bonuses, commissions, or other performance payments, this article is for you.
Properly compensating such employees is often not as simple as paying “time and a half” or “double-time” for qualifying hours. Rather, federal law, and the laws of many states, require employers to “recalculate” overtime rates
California law generally requires employers to pay non-exempt employees a premium of one hour of pay for non-compliant meal and rest periods. Employers have typically paid such premiums by using the employees’ standard hourly rates. A new California Supreme Court decision requires employers to pay premiums at a higher rate when employees receive nondiscretionary compensation.
On May 25, 2021, both houses of the Illinois General Assembly approved an amendment to the State’s Wage Payment and Collection Act (“the Act”). The change would require employers who violate the Act to pay damages of 5% of the amount of any underpayment of wages, compensation, or wage supplements for each month following the
For more than 80 years, federal law has provided a general right to premium pay for working overtime hours, originally just for covered employees, then later for employees of covered enterprises. The laws of more than 30 states contain a comparable requirement, though in some instances differing in the particulars.
This presumptive right to the
I had planned to focus this month’s installment of “Time Is Money” on the practice of rounding timeclock entries, addressing the history behind the practice as well as factors that make rounding today a riskier proposition than it used to be. Then, while reviewing our previous writings on the subject, I came across my colleague
A sometimes-overlooked requirement for classifying an employee as exempt from overtime is that, with limited exceptions, the employee must be paid on a “salary basis.” [1] Indeed, when employers fail to pay their exempt employees on a salary basis, they may be subject to lawsuits alleging exempt misclassification. As such, properly paying employees on a
As part of a “third wave” of executive orders, on January 22, 2021, President Biden issued an executive order instructing the Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to “provide a report to the President with recommendations to promote a $15/hour minimum wage for Federal employees.” The Biden Administration announced via a Fact Sheet
On January 19, 2021, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (“WHD”) issued an Opinion Letter applying the Department’s recently-issued Final Rule concerning Independent Contractor Status under the Fair Labor Standards Act (the “Final Rule”). This Opinion Letter provides helpful guidance to businesses, especially those in highly-regulated industries, on how to properly structure
To close out 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (“WHD”) recently issued two new opinion letters addressing overtime payments for caregivers and travel time for partial-day teleworkers under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”). We recommend a close review of these opinion letters as they offer a helpful overview of key
At the time we are posting this, we are just weeks away from the inauguration of President-Elect Joseph Biden. Although perhaps not at the very top of the list of questions about the forthcoming Biden administration, somewhere on the list has to be this question: “What changes will we see in wage-hour law?”
We don’t