Articles Posted in Wage and Hour

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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 additional workplace protections for employees who need to express breast milk, creating protections for an estimated nine million more employees.

Last week, the Wage and Hour Division published, Enforcement of Protections for Employees to Pump Breast Milk at Work, to help Department of Labor field staff enforce the law. This blog post is your movie trailer version of this latest publication.

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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 working more than 40 hours in a workweek? Continue reading

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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 reform bill introduced earlier this week in both the House and the Senate aims to boost that salary level yearly until 2027 to make it much easier for salaried American workers to be overtime eligible. Continue reading

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 employee had worked only one day, his paycheck would total (at the range’s low end) $963; but if he had worked all 14 days, his paycheck would come to $13,482. Under that compensation scheme, the company paid the employee over $200,000 annually, with no overtime compensation.

But, the employee who supervised many others and otherwise satisfied the duties tests for the executive exemption under the Fair Labor Standards Act sued for unpaid overtime because, he claimed, the company failed to guarantee him at least $455 per week in salary. Continue reading

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