Overtime Lawyer

Overtime and wage violations can take many different forms. 

For example, an employer may require you to voluntarily work more than 40 hours in a week but fail to provide compensation for the extra hours. Or, the employer pays overtime; however, he or she doesn’t take into account all the time spent on work-related activities, such as traveling to a meeting or attending to clients during rest breaks and lunch hour.

At The Hedgpeth Law Firm, PC, we specialize in the following overtime and wage violations:

Misclassification of workers as exempt

Under the Fair Labor Standards Acts (FLSA), an employee is classified as non-exempt or exempt. Non-exempt employees are entitled to overtime if they work more than 40 hours in a week. Unfortunately, some employers from different industries misclassify their salaried workers as exempt, even though the employees’ job duties qualify them for the non-exempt class. 

Many employers commit this unethical and illegal offense knowingly because they want to avoid the overtime costs. The companies usually give employees inflated job titles like supervisors, managers, and assistant managers to exempt them from overtime pay. 

If your job duties do not match the job title, you may be eligible for illegally denied overtime wages.

Misclassification of employees as independent contractors

Independent contractors are among the group of workers exempted from overtime because they’re considered self-employed. Classifying an employee as an independent contractor is illegal, whether an employer does it unintentionally or not. The overtime laws protect you even if you have signed a contract that classifies you as a contractor. You can file an unpaid overtime lawsuit, as long as your job duty legally qualifies you as an employee.

Minimum wage violations

Each year, employers steal billions from paychecks of unsuspecting workers like day-rate workers and tipped employees. A multitude of companies usually pays their workers less than the $7.25 minimum hourly wage set by the federal government. Some states have higher minimum wage limits.

Failure to get compensated for all the hours worked

Employers should accurately track and pay for all the hours an employee spends on performing tasks that benefit the company. Of course, this includes the time when a worker is away from the employer’s premises. Here are some of the common examples where an employee deserves to get compensated for their time:

· Waiting for assignment when none is immediately available

· Loading or warming up trucks before a shift

· Answering calls from customers or responding to emails during non-work hours

· Dropping off products to customers

· Transferring equipment to a worksite

· Preparing a worksite

· Cleaning up equipment or worksite after a shift

· Attending a meeting or undergoing training

· Taking short breaks ( 5 to 20 minutes)

Tip pooling and sharing violations

The FLSA defines tipped employees as workers who receive more than $30 per month in gratitude. Waiters, bartenders, bellhops, and busboys fall into the category of tipped employees. The wage laws require that tips put in the general pool to be shared among tipped workers only. However, some business owners, managers, and supervisors usually want a share of the tips. Unfortunately, sharing tips with non-tipped workers often leads to tipped employees receiving less than the minimum wage.

Employer not paying overtime each week

When computing the overtime hours, some employers make a mistake of averaging hours worked over several weeks. Let’s assume an employee accumulated 35 hours in the first week and 45 hours in the following week. If an employer pays based on an average of two workweeks, the worker would have worked 40 hours each week. Therefore, they won’t receive money for the extra 5 hours worked in the second week, which is illegal. The pay rate for the additional hours cannot be the same as regular work hours. That is why averaging does not work. Employers must pay for the extra hours at a rate of 1.5 times the regular wages.

Employer pays half-time

The Department of Labor has put some restrictions on the half-time or fluctuating workweek method of computing overtime. With the half-pay or Chinese overtime, an employer pays one-half times your regular hourly rate. To use this overtime compensation method, an employee must meet the following requirements:

1. Employee’s work hours must fluctuate from week to week

2. The employee must be on a fixed salary regardless of the hours worked in a week

3. There must be a “clear and mutual understanding” between the employer and worker on requirement No.2

4. The fixed salary must be high enough to meet the federal minimum wage in any workweek

When employees are paid half-time without meeting these requirements, the employer can face lawsuits on the grounds of underpaid overtime and minimum wage violations