The federal Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division recently announced a six-month self-audit pilot program intended to allow employers to review and correct overtime and minimum wage violations. The Payroll Audit...more
President Trump has signed into law an omnibus federal budget for fiscal year 2018. Among the bill’s provisions is a compromise intended to end litigation and regulatory uncertainty over employers requiring mandatory tip...more
Earlier this year, EmployNews reported that the National Labor Relations Board had reversed its controversial 2015 Browning-Ferris decision, which set a new standard for joint employer liability for labor law violations. In...more
For employers in the hospitality industry, tipping policies continue to pose significant litigation risks. A number of restaurant groups have faced recent class and collective action claims based on allegations that the...more
3/7/2018
/ Appeals ,
Department of Labor (DOL) ,
En Banc Review ,
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) ,
Hospitality Industry ,
Minimum Wage ,
Restaurant Industry ,
Statutory Interpretation ,
Tip Credit ,
Tip-Pooling ,
Tipped Employees ,
Wage and Hour
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, employee compensation counted for purposes of fulfilling minimum wage and overtime obligations need not be paid all in cash. According to Section 203(m) of the FLSA, wages also include...more
Last year, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division announced its intent to again issue opinion letters in response to wage payment questions posed to the agency by employers and employees. Last month, DOL...more
Mandatory arbitration agreements can help employers avoid some of the costs and delays involved in litigation and eliminate the possibility of an uninformed or random jury decision. While courts generally favor agreements to...more
Last month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals became the fourth appellate circuit to reject the Department of Labor’s six-part test for determining whether internships at for-profit companies must be paid. The DOL test...more
When involved in a criminal investigation, the cover-up is usually worse than the underlying crime. Last month, a New Hampshire business owner learned this lesson the hard way when he pleaded guilty to charges based on his...more
Under the Family and Medical Leave Act, employees are entitled to take intermittent leave to deal with a serious health condition. The intermittent leave can be in increments as small as one hour. The employer must maintain...more
Last week, the federal Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division proposed repealing a controversial regulation affecting employers in the hospitality industry. The regulation interpreted a provision of the Fair Labor...more
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, certain drivers of commercial vehicles in interstate commerce are exempt from the law’s overtime provisions. In 2008, Congress amended the FLSA to apply the overtime requirement to drivers...more
Last year’s proposal to increase the minimum salary to qualify for exemption from federal overtime requirements hit nonprofit employers particularly hard. While the new salary levels never went into effect, many nonprofits...more
As previously reported in EmployNews, in December a creative group of plaintiffs’ lawyers filed suit against Chipotle in federal district court in New Jersey. The lawyers contended that despite a Texas federal court’s...more
11/22/2017
/ Chipotle Grill ,
Collective Actions ,
Contempt ,
Department of Labor (DOL) ,
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) ,
Injunctions ,
Minimum Salary ,
Motion for Sanctions ,
Over-Time ,
Wage and Hour ,
White-Collar Exemptions
The Fair Labor Standards Act requires that employees be paid a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. In Douglas v. Xerox Business Services, LLC, the plaintiffs challenged Xerox’s variable pay system as violating these requirements....more
In recent years, a number of companies have faced lawsuits from unpaid interns who claim that they should have been compensated for their work. The Department of Labor considers internships to be subject to federal minimum...more
On November 2, Republican congresswomen introduced legislation that would relieve employers from the growing patchwork of state and local paid employee leave laws in return for their guarantee of certain paid benefits. The...more
Department of Labor regulations issued under the Fair Labor Standards Act (29 C.F.R. § 785.18) state that any break time less than 20 minutes for nonexempt employees is considered compensable working time. Earlier this month,...more
On October 12, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals partially approved and partially rejected an unusual pay plan designed to satisfy federal minimum wage requirements. In Stein v. HHGregg, Inc., the employer placed retail...more
Employees who receive gratuities may qualify for a special federal minimum wage set well below the standard $7.25 per hour. Employers are entitled to use the employees’ tips to reach the full minimum wage under the Department...more
Any employer that has been the subject of e-discovery requests can attest to the difficulty and expense encountered when compiling and producing company electronic communications. These burdens have been further exacerbated...more
Unlike private sector employers, federal contractors are subject to an executive order that requires payment of a minimum wage in excess of the $7.25 federal level. In addition, that minimum adjusts annually based on cost of...more
In 2015, a Raleigh newspaper ran a series of investigative articles focused on construction industry members that classified a large portion of their workers as independent contractors instead of employees. The articles...more
Over the past several years, we have received multiple inquiries from employers confronted with claims that they have misclassified service technicians as exempt from the overtime requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act...more
The financial services industry has been a prime target for class and collective action claims for overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and related state laws. For decades, banks and related institutions...more