The DOL has finally answered the workplace question keeping America awake: May employees take home a puppy without bringing home an overtime claim? Please remain calm: the puppies are fine.
A supervisor can tend bar, cover tables, and help bus dishes. But under a DOL opinion letter, performing tipped work does not necessarily earn that employee a share of other employees’ tips.
Apparently, even the walk to lunch can become a federal wage-and-hour question. The answer depends less on the distance traveled than on what remains when employees arrive.
Lizzo’s touring company swept every remaining claim from a former wardrobe assistant’s lawsuit off the stage. The celebrity headline masks an evidence lesson.
Answering a page takes fifteen seconds. Making the follow-up call can quietly turn your commute into paid time.
Your office staff want to skip rush hour by working part of the day from home. The DOL just told you exactly how to let them do it without creating a wage and hour problem.
Sign-on bonuses with clawback provisions are common. Their interaction with overtime pay calculations is not well understood. A federal court in Virginia just issued a ruling that every employer using these bonuses should read.
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.
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