Q. A salaried, exempt employee who recently returned from a week of unpaid FMLA leave claims that he is entitled to be paid his full salary for entire week because he responded to a number of work-related e-mails and telephone calls while he was out. Do we have to pay?

A. Wage and hour law is confusing enough on its own, but it becomes even more so when it intersects with other complicated legal issues, like the Family and Medical Leave Act. On our FMLA Insights blog, my colleague Jeff Nowak explains how to deal with this situation from the perspective of counting the employee's time as FMLA leave. But that leaves open the question of whether and how much the employee is entitled to be paid.

As we explained in a recent post regarding unpaid disciplinary suspensions, in most cases employees who are classified as exempt executives, administrators, and professionals under the Fair Labor Standards Act must be paid on a "salary basis," meaning that they must receive a fixed salary each workweek that does not vary regardless of the number of hours worked or the quality or quantity of work performed.

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