If your quarterly bonus is calculated as a proportional share of each employee’s total earnings — straight time plus overtime — the DOL says you do not owe any additional overtime on top of it. The overtime premium is already in the math.
An employee at a large secured facility argued that a 30-minute meal break was effectively coercive because the walk to the parking lot consumed most of it. The DOL disagreed — and the reasoning applies to any employer whose physical layout makes leaving the premises during a break impractical.
Some salaried employees want to pick up extra hourly shifts — in a warehouse, on a retail floor, at a patient bedside. The DOL just confirmed that arrangement can work under the FLSA, with conditions worth understanding before you build it into your scheduling.
Seven minutes doesn’t sound like much. Multiply it by 18,000 employees, every workday, and it’s a wage and hour audit waiting to happen.
A restaurant charged its servers a dollar a shift for silverware and pens. That dollar voided the tip credit for every hour every server ever worked, and the liquidated damages doubled the bill.
The 2024 overtime rule is officially gone from the federal rulebook. Courts killed it a year and a half ago; the DOL just got around to the paperwork.
Fail any one of the three prongs of New Jersey’s ABC test, and the worker is your employee. The Department of Labor adopted new independent contractor rules on May 5, making that standard official in binding regulation, and employers have until October 1 to get their contractor relationships in order.
Three administrations, multiple rules, and still no settled federal standard on joint employment. The DOL’s new proposed rule is the latest attempt to end that uncertainty.
He worked as a building superintendent for three and a half years. His employer conceded he did the work. He was never paid wages after his first two weeks. The New Jersey Supreme Court just explained why that arrangement is going to cost the employer. Continue reading
Can an employee secretly rack up overtime and sue for it later?
The Fifth Circuit says not without proof that the employer knew or should have known about those hours. Continue reading
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