California Employment News: The Regular Rate of Pay and Risks of Getting it Wrong
#WorkforceWednesday: Joint Employment, Coronavirus, Medical Marijuana Protections - Employment Law This Week®
III-44- A Little Help From The DOL
On November 8, 2024, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) issued Opinion Letter FLSA2024-01. This letter provides additional clarity about whether daily expense reimbursement payments can be excluded from an employee’s regular...more
The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that Colorado law is not like federal law when it comes to holiday pay. The Court found that the Colorado Minimum Wage Order (currently, COMPS Order 39) requires holiday incentive pay be...more
On January 12, 2024, the federal Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals asked the Colorado Supreme Court to clarify whether, under Colorado law, holiday incentive pay must be included when calculating an employee’s regular rate of...more
Last week, the Colorado Supreme Court issued a highly anticipated decision, finding that the “regular rate of pay” under Colorado law does include holiday incentive pay for purposes of calculating overtime. The Tenth Circuit,...more
How the FLSA “tip credit” is applied has been pushed and pulled numerous times over the last two decades. In the latest volley, the Fifth Circuit entered an order on August 23, 2024, vacating the Department of Labor’s 2021...more
Recently, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders introduced proposed legislation that would reduce the standard workweek in the United States from 40 to 32 hours. The Bill, titled the “Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act” (the Act), would...more
I am always interested in cases that analyze what payments should and should not be included in the regular rate. These issues are important to employers because their overtime liability/exposure can be dramatically inflated...more
Wage and hour issues continue to challenge most employers, especially those in the manufacturing industry. The manufacturing industry tends to be more process- and systems-oriented and generally employ many hourly workers who...more
County firefighters and law enforcement officers who opt out of employer- or union-provided health insurance coverage receive a monetary credit each pay period, minus an “opt-out fee” that goes toward the costs of maintaining...more
In the wake of the pandemic, some employers — opting for the carrot over the stick — have started offering weekly attendance bonuses to incentivize a return to the office. We have recently seen an uptick in employee-filed...more
I. SYNOPSIS- Ed was a vibrant and healthy 85-year-old. One day, he decided to sign an advance healthcare directive providing that if his physical condition ever declined, he wished to remain in his home as long as...more
One of the most common mistakes made by employers is the failure to properly calculate the regular rate when paying overtime compensation to employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA is a cornerstone of...more
I read an interesting post by Frank Shuster of Constangy, Brooks, Smith on the thorny and often misunderstood issue of the “regular rate” and what that concept entails for compliance with the FLSA. Many employers,...more
In the past week, a class action lawsuit was filed against Anheuser-Busch, alleging various violations of California’s wage and hour laws. You may ask, “What’s newsworthy about that? Aren’t hundreds of such lawsuits filed...more
Reviving a security guard’s claim for overtime pay, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals recently reiterated that employers may not pay employees an artificially low regular rate of pay to avoid paying the proper amount of...more
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says it has taken its first-ever Clean Water Act (CWA) enforcement action against water pollution by so-called “forever chemicals” from a West Virginia chemical plant. On April...more
February 20, 2023, was Presidents’ Day, one of several federal holidays occurring throughout the year in the United States. Private-sector employers are not required by federal law to give employees any federal holidays off....more
I always tell clients it is not enough to “merely” comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act on wage-hour issues. I always tell them that they must comply with State law, which may (often) be stricter than the federal law and...more
When the US Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division published a Final Rule on the regular rate in late 2019, it gave employers the freedom to more easily offer perks and benefits to their employees without running afoul...more
As 2022 is coming to a close, we’ve rounded up the top five most popular topics from our employment law blog over the past year. Take a look back with us!...more
It is black letter FLSA canon that a promised bonus, such as a production bonus, or longevity bonus, must be included in the regular rate of employees who work overtime for the period of time covered by the bonus. This maxim...more
The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide whether a supervisor who was paid a daily, rather than a weekly, rate and earned more than $200,000 a year is exempt from the overtime provisions of the federal Fair Labor Standards...more
I have often dealt with exemption issues, most of which involve the white-collar exemptions, however, I have also had cases involving the nuanced, difficult-to-understand, commission exemption under Section 7(i) of the FLSA. ...more
The Fair Labor Standards Act provides an employee should receive compensation for overtime hours at a rate “not less than one and one-half times the regular rate at which he is employed.” 29 U.S.C. § 207(a)(1). This is a...more
Pennsylvania employers with salaried, nonexempt employees working in the commonwealth may need to adjust how they calculate overtime premiums for these employees in light of amendments to the Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act...more