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FLSA

Steakhouse staff worked to the bone for lean pay

02/01/2013
Raleigh’s Brasa Brazilian Steak-house will pay $68,482 to 18 workers after the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division found the steakhouse failed to pay workers overtime when they worked more than 40 hours in a week.

Rite-Aid OT settlement will cost over $27 million

01/25/2013

The Rite-Aid drugstore chain, based in Camp Hill, will end 14 different over­­time lawsuits with one huge settlement of more than $27 million. Plaintiffs had alleged the company misclassified assistant managers and co-managers to avoid paying them overtime.

Want to cut overtime pay? It’s OK to alter workweek–as long as change is permanent

01/24/2013
Good news for cost-conscious employers: As a federal court ruled recently, employers are free to change how they designate the workweek as long as they do so “permanently”—even if the sole reason is to reduce overtime pay.

Why bother with job descriptions? 3 reasons

01/22/2013
Writing job descriptions for all of the positions in your company may sound like a lot of work, especially when they are not required by any law. But there are plenty of legal reasons why you should have them.

San Francisco grocer held too much green

01/22/2013
The San Francisco grocery store chain Casa Guadalupe and its owner have agreed to pay more than $120,000 to settle a wage-and-hour lawsuit filed by the DOL. The owner admitted to investigators that he willfully failed to issue time-and-a-half overtime pay to employees who worked more than 40 hours in a week.

Pay lawsuits: Keep time records on your side

01/22/2013

While the FLSA requires you to have a reliable system to accurately track employees’ hours and pay, the regulations don’t say which types of timekeeping methods you should use—paper, time clock, etc. Any timekeeping plan is acceptable, the rules say, “as long as it is complete and accurate.” But it’s vital to know exactly what data to track.

Exempt or not? Forget 50% rule for store managers who multitask

01/15/2013
Good news for employers that classify their store managers as exempt from overtime, even though they spend more than half their time doing nonexempt tasks. As the following case shows, store managers can still retain their exempt status if they multitask on exempt and nonexempt duties throughout the day.

Do we need to track hours for pieceworkers?

01/11/2013

Q. We are doing an internal review of our recordkeeping, and we realized that we track hours for our on-site transcriptionists but we have not been tracking the hours for our transcriptionists who work from home. The on-site employees are non­exempt and we pay them an hourly wage. However, the remote employees are paid piece rates—a certain rate for the number of words transcribed from dictation. Do we have to keep track of their hours?

Some small employers may be exempt from the FLSA

01/11/2013
If your business is small enough and local enough (meaning you don’t produce goods for interstate sale or perform work outside your own state), you may not have to follow the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.

Employee has routine gripe about timekeeping? That’s not necessarily protected activity

01/11/2013
Employees who question your timekeeping process may be setting you up for an FLSA lawsuit. How you respond may make the difference between winning and losing. If you promptly fix what turns out to have been an innocent mistake, the court probably won’t consider the original complaint protected activity.