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Wages & Hours

WHD rolls two sushi restaurants for OT violations

02/18/2014
Two Nassau County sushi restaurants will pay $261,887 in back wages and liquidated damages to 70 workers following an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division.

Obama: Higher minimum for fed contractors’ employees

02/18/2014
President Obama plans to issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay employees at least $10.10 per hour, starting in 2015.

When is it OK to punish by docking pay?

02/13/2014
Q. May I dock an employee’s pay as a penalty for disciplinary infractions?

Is there any hidden obligation to give raises?

02/11/2014
Q. Does any law require a company to give employees a raise at the end of the year or other amount of time?

Employers dropping internships to avoid liability

02/10/2014
Fallout from the landmark “Black Swan” court ruling in 2012 is being felt in workplaces across the country. More employers are dropping their internship programs after a federal court said Fox Searchlight must pay its unpaid interns at least minimum wage.

Obama to order higher minimum wage for fed contractor employees

02/05/2014
President Obama plans to issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay employees at least $10.10 per hour, starting in 2015. The announcement came during Obama’s State of the Union address.

Is time that an employee spends on-call compensable?

01/28/2014
Q: An employee carries a company-issued smartphone so he can respond to emergencies over the weekend. He can usually resolve an issue with a phone call. How should we pay him—for the time he’s responding to an emergency or for all the time he has the phone?

FLSA: Overtime and Base-Rate Pay

01/25/2014

HR Law 101: Employers must pay overtime to nonexempt employees who work more than 40 hours in a single workweek. The overtime rate is one and a half times an employee’s hourly rate. If an employee earns a fixed hourly rate with no other compensation, computing the base rate is easy. But in many cases, it’s not so simple …

Unpaid internships could be very expensive for employers

01/24/2014

By some estimates, more than a million people participate in internships each year in the United States, as many as half of them unpaid or for less than the minimum wage. That can be a problem for em­­ployers: Misclassifying employees as unpaid interns can result in costly litigation, civil fines or both.

Despite misgivings, judge backs Applebee’s arbitration policy

01/24/2014
A waiter at a Philadelphia area Apple­­bee’s will have to go it alone against the company after a federal judge reluctantly admitted the man signed away his right to litigate in federal court when he joined the company.