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Wages & Hours

How can we avoid wage-and-hour class action lawsuits?

10/07/2008

Q. I keep hearing about wage-and-hour class actions, where workers claim they were not paid properly because they were misclassified as exempt, not paid for all hours or not paid the correct overtime rate. What can I do to minimize this risk? …

DOL grills tortilla maker, gets agreement on back pay

10/06/2008

De Maiz Tortilleria, a tortilla production company in Pharr, Texas, has agreed to pay $401,314 in back wages to 133 employees following a U.S. Department of Labor investigation looking into allegations it violated the FLSA …

Bilingual employees invaluable to you? Don’t punish them for their special skills

10/06/2008

Texas has a large number of Spanish-speaking residents, and a workforce that can effectively communicate with those residents can be a prized commodity. But before you thrust additional work on Hispanic employees who can communicate with customers who don’t speak English well, consider the following case …

Pay for employee who works through lunch?

10/06/2008

Q. Must we pay a nonexempt employee who voluntarily works through lunch for the time, even though we never requested the extra work? …

Child support payments

10/06/2008

Q. Do we have to deduct child-support payments from employee wages? …

Job description should spell out employee’s exempt or hourly status

10/03/2008

There’s no excuse for anyone to be confused about his or her exempt or nonexempt employment status. Make sure every position description clearly labels the job either salaried or hourly. Otherwise, employees will turn to the courts to figure out whether you owe them unpaid overtime or whether you have violated the FLSA …

Document every pay decision

10/03/2008

When you decide to give employees a pay raise—or deny them one—always document the reason. The key is contemporaneous, logical explanations. Few employees will succeed in proving that your reasonable rationale is really a pretext for some form of discrimination …

DOT violated labor laws, inspector general says

10/03/2008

Since 2005, the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) has paid roughly $6 million in overtime to exempt employees who aren’t entitled to it, according to a report from Inspector General Tom Charles.

Home building equals team building for employees of Colorado firm

10/03/2008

The most popular team-building exercise among employees of InsureMe in Englewood, Colo., is a four-day trip to Juarez, Mexico, during which they build homes for low-income Mexican families. Nineteen of the firm’s 64 employees have made the trek. Each employee gets two paid days off to participate …

Selling flex to management? Focus on benefits beyond HR

10/03/2008

If you want support from the C-suite for work/life benefits, tout flexible schedules and telework as tools that do more than aid recruiting and retention. In a recent survey, CFOs said that for flexibility to succeed, organizations have to perceive it as more than an employee perk.