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Wages & Hours

Is it legal to discipline an employee for tardiness by suspending her without pay?

08/26/2008
Q. I work in HR at a customer call-in center. To make sure we have enough coverage to handle calls, we have a strict tardiness policy. Recently, one of our customer service agents was late for work several days in a row. She is an otherwise outstanding performer and we don’t want to fire her. In the alternative, we would like to suspend her for one week without pay. Is that legal? …

Beware the Overtime Trap that Even Tripped up the Army

08/26/2008
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) regulations say that certain kinds of "outside" salespeople are exempt from the FLSA’s overtime provisions. But to qualify as exempt, a salesperson must be the one who closes the sale. As  the following case shows—and as an Army recruiting contractor recently found out—that test can be a high hurdle.

Research, diligence, documentation key to making good-Faith FLSA classifications

08/25/2008
Under the FLSA, exempt employees don’t receive overtime pay. But figuring out just who fits in one of the exemptions is not an easy task. Get it wrong, and you could be liable for twice the overtime you should have paid, going back two years. Get it really wrong—by failing to act in good faith—and you’ll have to pay for an additional year. There’s a small silver lining behind that dark cloud …

Lower retirement pay doesn’t excuse late discrimination filing

08/22/2008
Employees who believe they have suffered pay discrimination have to move fast to file their claims. They can’t wait, for example, until after they retire and only then claim their retirement benefits are lower than they should be because they were discriminated against …

N.C. workers’ compensation may cover injury-related depression

08/22/2008

Employees who are hurt on the job sometimes become depressed because they can’t do the things they previously could. That depression may then complicate their recovery or even prevent them from getting better. The practical result is that employers and their workers’ compensation carriers will have to pay lost wages longer …

Energy crunch: Wayne County tries four-Day workweek

08/22/2008
Roughly half of Wayne County’s 1,032 workers are switching to a four-day workweek to cut commuting costs and energy bills and to boost employee morale. County officials hope the move will cut utility costs by $300,000 per year …

Employ teens? Child-Labor fines, enforcement on the rise

08/21/2008
Buried in the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) that President Bush signed this year was a little-noticed provision that substantially increased the potential fines against employers that violate federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) child-labor laws. If employees under age 18 are killed or seriously hurt due to an FLSA child-labor violation, employers can now face a $50,000 fine for each violation

GAO pokes a stick at Wage & Hour auditors, waking them up for more aggressive OT probes

08/21/2008

A recent GAO report sharply criticized the Bush administration for mishandling overtime, back-pay and final-paycheck complaints filed by U.S. employees. The report said U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage & Hour Division auditors often failed to thoroughly investigate claims …

DOL: Employees must be paid for time worked, even if they violate mandatory meal-Break policy

08/21/2008
Work time is paid time. Period. You still must pay employees even if they work through a company-mandated meal break without a supervisor’s approval, according to a new U.S. Department of Labor opinion letter released July 29 …

Dealing with negative leave balances

08/21/2008
Q. I know I must pay exempt employees their full salaries even if they have no accrued benefits in their leave plans and their accounts have negative balances. But can I keep negative balance tallies and then subtract the negative balances as the employees earn more leave? — T.C., Virginia …