Roman Oleinik, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons It wasn’t quite instant karma. But two years after paying a worker’s final wages in a wheelbarrow full of oily pennies, an employer learned an expensive wage and hour lesson. A little over two years ago, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL)…
For over a decade, federal law has required most employers to provide a nursing mother with reasonable break time to express breast milk after the birth of her child for up to one year after childbirth. Last December, the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act became law. The PUMP Act provides…
The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to pay covered nonexempt workers overtime pay at a rate not less than one and one-half times the regular rate of pay after 40 hours of work in a workweek. So what happens when employees claim not to receive premium overtime pay despite…
Federal law requires most companies to pay minimum wage and overtime pay for employees unless they qualify for an exemption. Employees generally must meet certain tests regarding their job duties and get a salary of at least $684 per week, which works out to just $35,568 per year. But a new overtime…
Those were the critical issues in a precedential decision that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals issued yesterday. So let’s talk about it. Generally speaking, a federal law called the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) says that people who earn an hourly wage can get overtime (one-and-a-half times their regular hourly wage for…
Benoît Prieur, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons Fair Labor Standards Act lawsuits aren’t exactly fodder for Silver Screen blockbusters. In a recent decision from the Middle District of Pennsylvania — not known as a Hollywood pipeline — the question was whether donning and doffing basic personal protective equipment (“PPE”) was “integral and indispensable”…
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay A company operating an offshore oil rig paid one of its “tool pushers” anywhere from $963 to $1,341 per day. His paycheck, issued every two weeks, amounted to his daily rate times the number of days he had worked in the pay period. So if…
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Field Assistance Bulletin on employee telework is the blogging gift that keeps on giving. Last week, we addressed how to determine whether a remote employee is FMLA-eligible. Today, let’s get when you have to pay nonexempt remote workers for break time. In general, the FLSA…
I like to tell people who will listen to me, which frequently isn’t even my kids, that I can go into most workplaces and sleuth out at least one wage-and-hour violation. The Fair Labor Standards Act, the complex federal wage-and-hour law, contains many hidden traps that ensnare even the most…
I’m hitting this technology theme hard this week. And why shouldn’t I?!? We’ve got a banger edition of The Employer Handbook Zoom Office Happy Hour set for Noon ET on Friday, November 4, 2022. Along with a team of cyber-risk, privacy, and data security attorneys from FisherBroyles, we will present Cybersecurity 101 for HR Professionals…