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Wages & Hours

Accurate pay statements: your responsibility

08/27/2018
It is the employer’s responsibility to ensure employees receive accurate wage statements with each paycheck. That’s true even if the employee hasn’t provided an accurate accounting of time worked.

Time rounding must generally favor employees

08/27/2018
Under Department of Labor regulations covering the Fair Labor Standards Act, employers must pay workers for all time worked, subject to some rounding. Time may be kept, and pay computed, based on rounding “to the nearest 5 minutes, or to the nearest one-tenth or quarter of an hour.”

Snapshot: How much is that promotion worth?

08/21/2018
Average wages have grown just 2.8% since last year. But employees who won promotions saw their pay increase 8.7%.

Salaries flat in ’19, budgets increasing less than 3%

08/21/2018
As the job market continues to tighten, you’d think employers’ wallets would loosen up. But that’s not happening, at least not for broad increases in salary budgets.

Employees losing ground as inflation outstrips wage growth

08/14/2018
The “real wage” metric the federal government uses to gauge the average American’s take-home pay fell 2 cents in the last year, to $10.76 per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

New tip rules: Prepare for a deep dive into the tip pool

08/06/2018
Employers have long been allowed to pay tipped employees less than the usual minimum wage. In some industries, tips have traditionally been pooled, so “back-of-the-house” staff can share in customers’ generosity. But the informality of tipping means it is a surprisingly complicated wage-and-hour issue.

Snapshot: Salary budgets inch upward

07/31/2018
U.S. employers are expected to budget for pay raises averaging 3.2% in 2019.

Time clock rounding case offers lessons on compensable time

07/30/2018
If you use a rounding system, take care to ensure that it is fair and neutral, and that, on average, the amount of employee time that is deducted is the same or less than the amount added to time records as time worked.

Economy is booming, but when will wages rise?

07/17/2018
With low unemployment and a growing GDP, Americans are feeling much more comfortable about the economy. Yet a concerning trend lurks underneath an otherwise booming economy: slow wage growth.

Follow rules to set alternative workweek schedule

05/30/2018
California wage-and-hour law can be complicated. For example, California allows establishment of something call­­ed alternative workweek schedules. Employees have to approve an AWS by voting via a secret ballot.