Being early is usually a good thing. Being required to arrive early and then waiting outside a locked workplace raises an important wage and hour question.

TL;DR: A federal appeals court revived a grocery employee’s unpaid-wage claims after she alleged that employees had to arrive fifteen minutes before their listed shifts but sometimes couldn’t enter or clock in. Required waiting time can be paid time even before productive work begins. The court also declined to dismiss the recurring fifteen-minute waits as too trivial to count.

📄 Read the court’s decision.

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

Answering a page takes fifteen seconds. Making the follow-up call can quietly turn your commute into paid time.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading