Under the Family and Medical Leave Act, employees are entitled to take intermittent leave to deal with a serious health condition. The intermittent leave can be in increments as small as one hour. The employer must maintain...more
Last week, the federal Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division proposed repealing a controversial regulation affecting employers in the hospitality industry. The regulation interpreted a provision of the Fair Labor...more
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, certain drivers of commercial vehicles in interstate commerce are exempt from the law’s overtime provisions. In 2008, Congress amended the FLSA to apply the overtime requirement to drivers...more
Last year’s proposal to increase the minimum salary to qualify for exemption from federal overtime requirements hit nonprofit employers particularly hard. While the new salary levels never went into effect, many nonprofits...more
As previously reported in EmployNews, in December a creative group of plaintiffs’ lawyers filed suit against Chipotle in federal district court in New Jersey. The lawyers contended that despite a Texas federal court’s...more
11/22/2017
/ Chipotle Grill ,
Collective Actions ,
Contempt ,
Department of Labor (DOL) ,
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) ,
Injunctions ,
Minimum Salary ,
Motion for Sanctions ,
Over-Time ,
Wage and Hour ,
White-Collar Exemptions
The Fair Labor Standards Act requires that employees be paid a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. In Douglas v. Xerox Business Services, LLC, the plaintiffs challenged Xerox’s variable pay system as violating these requirements....more
In recent years, a number of companies have faced lawsuits from unpaid interns who claim that they should have been compensated for their work. The Department of Labor considers internships to be subject to federal minimum...more
On November 2, Republican congresswomen introduced legislation that would relieve employers from the growing patchwork of state and local paid employee leave laws in return for their guarantee of certain paid benefits. The...more
Department of Labor regulations issued under the Fair Labor Standards Act (29 C.F.R. § 785.18) state that any break time less than 20 minutes for nonexempt employees is considered compensable working time. Earlier this month,...more
On October 12, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals partially approved and partially rejected an unusual pay plan designed to satisfy federal minimum wage requirements. In Stein v. HHGregg, Inc., the employer placed retail...more
Employees who receive gratuities may qualify for a special federal minimum wage set well below the standard $7.25 per hour. Employers are entitled to use the employees’ tips to reach the full minimum wage under the Department...more
Any employer that has been the subject of e-discovery requests can attest to the difficulty and expense encountered when compiling and producing company electronic communications. These burdens have been further exacerbated...more
Unlike private sector employers, federal contractors are subject to an executive order that requires payment of a minimum wage in excess of the $7.25 federal level. In addition, that minimum adjusts annually based on cost of...more
In 2015, a Raleigh newspaper ran a series of investigative articles focused on construction industry members that classified a large portion of their workers as independent contractors instead of employees. The articles...more
The financial services industry has been a prime target for class and collective action claims for overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and related state laws. For decades, banks and related institutions...more
In 2011, the Obama Department of Labor (DOL) adopted a rule stating that service industry employers could not implement tip pooling rules, even if they did not claim the tip credit for minimum wage compliance purposes. Tip...more
On June 15, President Trump signed an Executive Order streamlining the design and approval for apprenticeship programs funded by the Department of Labor (DOL). The Order is intended to entice more employers to begin...more
The hospitality industry continues to battle numerous lawsuits claiming that employers failed to properly compensate employees who earn a portion of their wages through tips. Earlier this month, the Tenth Circuit Court of...more
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and state wage payment laws, employers are responsible for compliance with wage payment requirements. Plaintiffs cannot sue non-employers claiming overtime or minimum wage violations....more
2/8/2017
/ Appeals ,
Construction Industry ,
Corporate Counsel ,
Dismissals ,
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) ,
General Contractors ,
Joint Employers ,
Minimum Wage ,
Multi-Factor Test ,
Reversal ,
Subcontractors ,
Wage and Hour
In recent years, college athletes have made multiple attempts to gain protection under various federal labor laws. For example, the NLRB recently rejected an attempt by football players at Northwestern to unionize....more
Last year in its Encino Motorcars decision, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ reliance on a Department of Labor (DOL) interpretation finding that automobile dealership service advisors do not...more
Emails can simultaneously be considered a tremendous leap in business efficiency, as well as the bane of many employees’ existence. In December, the French government took action to untie employees from their cell phones and...more
Many employers are approaching the time when annual incentive bonuses are calculated and paid to employees. For non-exempt employees subject to the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), employers must...more
A federal district court’s unanticipated injunction on November 22 blocked the planned December 1 implementation date for the Department of Labor’s (DOL) increased minimum salary required to claim most exemptions from the...more
On November 22, a federal district court judge in Texas issued a nationwide injunction prohibiting the Department of Labor from enacting its new overtime exemption salary increase on December 1 as scheduled. The judge...more