Don’t Let Your Efforts to Reduce Overtime Lead to a Class Action

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Wages, salaries, and benefits make up a large proportion of costs for most businesses. One way to control these costs is to control how much overtime employees work. In California, nonexempt (i.e. hourly) employees are entitled to one and half times their regular rate of pay when they work more than eight hours in a workday or 40 hours in a workweek. They’re also entitled to time and a half for the first eight hours on the seventh day of work in a workweek. Any work in excess of 12 hours in one workday, or eight hours on the seventh workday in a workweek must be paid at twice the employee’s regular rate of pay.

Some businesses address excessive overtime by telling their workers that they need management approval to work overtime. If they work overtime without approval, however, you still need to pay them for that work. You can counsel them, or even take corrective action for their failure to follow instructions. But you still need to pay them. Employees who aren’t paid for all of their time can claim overtime violations, minimum wage violations (for time they weren’t compensated for), waiting time penalties (up to 30 days pay if they weren’t paid everything they were owed at termination), PAGA penalties, attorneys’ fees, and more. California has no shortage of exorbitant penalties for seemingly minor violations.

Similar problems arise if employees who are forbidden to work overtime feel pressured to work “off the clock.” Take the example of a new nurse who needs to finish charting on his patients before he leaves for the day, but who’s also prohibited from working overtime. If he clocks out to finish his work and the employer knows about it, or reasonably should know about it, the employer needs to pay him for that time. Again, it can counsel him or take corrective action for not following the rules, but it can’t withhold his pay.

Managers working to reduce overtime need to make clear to their workers that they may not work off the clock. And if the managers learn of employees doing so, they need to ensure that they are paid for that time. Controlling overtime is an effective way of controlling costs, but only if you do it right. Do it wrong and you risk losing any possible savings and then some defending wage and hour claims.

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DISCLAIMER: Because of the generality of this update, the information provided herein may not be applicable in all situations and should not be acted upon without specific legal advice based on particular situations.

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