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The Employer Handbook BlogHow One Phone Call Can Make an Employee’s Commute Very Expensive, According to the DOL
Answering a page takes fifteen seconds. Making the follow-up call can quietly turn your commute into paid time.
Articles Posted in Wage and Hour
When a Midday Commute Between Home and Work Stays an Unpaid Commute, According to the DOL
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.
Might Your Sign-On Bonus Clawback Create an Overtime Problem? A Federal Court Just Answered.
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.
Does Your Quarterly Bonus Program Create an Overtime Recomputation Obligation?
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.
Do You Owe Employees More Paid Time If Leaving the Building Takes Half Their Lunch Break?
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.
Can a Salaried Exempt Employee Work Hourly Shifts Without Triggering Overtime on the Whole Salary?
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.
“De Minimis” Is Not a Magic Eraser for Seven Daily Minutes of Off-the-Clock Work
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.
Illegal Deductions, No Records, No Tip Credit: A Restaurant’s FLSA Trifecta
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 DOL Just Made It Official: The 2024 Overtime Rule Is Gone and the $684 Threshold Is Back.
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.
New Jersey’s Independent Contractor Rules Are Now Official — And the Burden Is All Yours
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.