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Wages & Hours

Don’t let applicants use your job offer to earn a raise

04/01/2006

Most of your job candidates sincerely want the job. But others may simply try to use your offer as a tool to negotiate a higher salary from their current bosses or other potential employers. Try to determine early on whether job candidates are just using you as a bargaining chip. You can save lots of time by dismissing candidates who were never truly interested …

Mandatory Off-Site Counseling Sessions May Be Paid ‘Work Time’

03/01/2006

If you require hourly employees to attend counseling or training workshops outside normal working hours as a condition of employment, you may need to pay employees for those hours. You may also need to pay the employees’ travel time, too …

Strong new economic numbers signal upward pressure on wages

03/01/2006

Several important economic indicators released last month suggest that wage growth and a tighter labor market are just around the corner …

Lesson of IBM overtime suit: Clarify exemption status

03/01/2006

IBM faces the possibility of multimillion-dollar legal damages if a court grants class-action status to a pending FLSA lawsuit …

Can you deduct overtime from bank of FMLA hours?

03/01/2006

Q. Can an employer deduct or count overtime hours from an employee’s FMLA balance? Our employees work overtime only from October through December. During that time, they’re required to work 12-hour days, seven days a week. We have several employees on both continuous FMLA and intermittent leave, and we’d like to deduct the overtime hours they would have worked from their FMLA allotment. What do you think? —J.A., Nebraska

Cutting hours is legal, but anticipate bias claims

03/01/2006

Q. Can we legally reduce the hours of full-time employees in one of our divisions because this division needs to cut overhead? —J.B., Massachusetts

Nonunion worker’s pay complaint is protected activity under NLRA

02/01/2006

A new court ruling offers more reason to remind your supervisors to discipline employees based on objective work-based standards. Never punish employees for discussing compensation or job conditions with their co-workers …

States become key battleground in the minimum wage fight

02/01/2006

It may be the Year of the Dog on the Chinese calendar, but it’s shaping up to be the year of the "living wage" in many states. Already, 17 states and the District of Columbia have legislated higher minimums than the federal $5.15 per hour rate …

Revise your overly complex employee review methods

02/01/2006

If your evaluation procedures are too complicated, employees may question whether they’re being treated fairly. Mild suspicions can quickly grow into expensive discrimination lawsuits, as a new court ruling shows …

Decrease in Overtime Hours Not Necessarily an ‘Adverse Action’

01/01/2006

Employees need to prove they suffered some sort of "adverse job action" (firing, demotion, worse job conditions, etc.) to file a discrimination lawsuit. But variations in work schedules don’t necessarily amount to an adverse action. That’s true even if an employee’s altered schedule results in fewer overtime hours …