Laws Agains Having All Employees on Salary

The Fair Labor Standards Deed (FLSA) guarantees a number of rights, primarily aimed at ensuring that workers get paid fairly for the time they work.

Employers must pay all covered employees not less than the minimum wage—currently set at $seven.25 an hr.

Some states have established a minimum wage that is higher than the federal ane—and you are entitled to the college rate if your state allows for one. Employers not covered by the FLSA, such equally small subcontract owners, are required to pay all workers the land minimum wage rate. (For information on your state'due south minimum wage police force, run into Wage and Hour Laws By State.)

The FLSA does non require any specific payment organization, and so employers may base of operations pay on time at work, piece rates, or some other measurement. In all cases, however, an employee'southward pay divided past the hours worked during the pay flow must equal or exceed the minimum wage.

Some employers either become dislocated by the nuances and exceptions in the wage and hour law or they curve the rules to suit their own pocketbooks. Any the state of affairs, you would exercise well to double-cheque your employer's math. A few simple rules distilled from the law may help.

• Hourly. Hourly employees must exist paid minimum wage for all hours worked. Your employer cannot accept an average or pay you less than minimum wage for some hours worked and more for others.

• Fixed rate or bacon. Employees paid at a fixed rate can check their wages by dividing the amount they are paid in a pay menstruation by the number of hours worked. The resulting boilerplate must be at least minimum wage.

• Commissions and piece rates. Your full pay divided by the number of hours you worked must boilerplate at least the minimum hourly wage rate.

Form of Pay

Under the FLSA, the pay you lot receive must be in the grade of cash or something that can be readily converted into greenbacks or other legal forms of bounty, such as food and lodging. Your employer cannot, for example, pay you lot with a coupon or token that can be spent only at a store run by the employer. Employee discounts granted by employers practice not count toward the minimum wage requirement.

Pay for Fourth dimension Off

Neither the minimum wage section nor any other office of the FLSA requires employers to pay employees for fourth dimension off, such as vacation, holidays, or sick days. Although well-nigh employers provide full-time workers some paid time off each year, the FLSA covers payment simply for time spent at work.

However, some country laws mandate that employees become paid time off for jury duty, voting, and family and medical go out. A few states and local governments crave employees to exist paid for sick days or sure types of family exit, either past the employer or from a state fund. And many state laws provide that if employers offer paid vacation days off, employees are entitled to be paid for the portion they have already earned when they quit or are fired.

Tips

When employees routinely receive a minimum amount in tips as part of their jobs—commonly, $xx to $thirty per calendar month equally gear up out in state law—their employers are allowed to pay less than the minimum wage and credit the tips received against the minimum wage requirement. Still, the employee'southward hourly wage plus the tips the employee actually earns must add up to at least the minimum wage—or the employer has to make up the divergence. (For more information, see Tips, Tip Pooling, and Tip Credits: What Service Employees Demand to Know.)

Commissions

When people are paid commissions for sales, those commissions may take the identify of wages. However, if the commissions do not equal the minimum wage, the FLSA requires the employer to make up the deviation.

EXAMPLE: Julia, a salesperson in an electronics store, is paid a percentage of the dollar volume of the sales she completes. During one slow week, she averaged but $2 in commissions per hour. Under the FLSA, her employer must pay her an boosted amount for each 60 minutes she worked through the beginning xl hours of that calendar week to equal the minimum wage, and more for any overtime hours.

Equal Pay for Equal Work

Men and women who exercise the same chore or jobs that require equal skill and responsibility must be compensated with equal wages and benefits nether a 1963 amendment to the FLSA called the Equal Pay Human action. (29 U.S.C. § 206.) Be aware, however, that some payment schemes that may wait discriminatory at outset glance practice not actually violate the Equal Pay Act. The Act allows disparate payments to men and women if they are based on:

• seniority systems

• merit systems

• systems measuring earnings by quantity or quality of product, such as a slice goods system, or

• any factor other than sex—for example, salary differentials that stem from unequal starting salaries based on differences in experience levels.

Although the Equal Pay Act basically covers the aforementioned employers and employees every bit the rest of the FLSA, there is 1 important departure: The Equal Pay Act also protects against discriminatory pay arrangements for executive, administrative, and professional employees—including administrators and teachers in unproblematic and secondary schools.

Pay for Overtime

The FLSA does not limit the number of hours an employee may work in a week, unless the employee is a minor. Just it does require that whatsoever covered worker who works more than forty hours in one calendar week must be paid at least one and one-half times his or her regular charge per unit of pay for every hour worked in excess of 40.

In addition to the FLSA overtime provisions, a number of state laws likewise define how and when overtime must be paid. Some states mensurate overtime on a daily, rather than weekly, basis. In these states, workers who put in more than eight hours a day are more often than not entitled to overtime, even if they work a total of xl or fewer hours in a week. (To larn your state's overtime rules, select it from the list at Wage and Hr Laws Past State.)

Hourly Pay

The math is simple if you lot are paid past the hour.

Example: Raymond works for a software shipping company at the wage of $eight per hour. When he works l hours in one week filling back orders in preparation for a national exhibition, Raymond must be paid $12 per hour for the final ten hours he worked that calendar week.

Jody, who is vice president of the software aircraft company and also Raymond'southward boss, also worked fifty hours the same week. Since Jody qualifies as an executive then is exempt from the FLSA, she is not entitled to overtime pay, simply receives her regular weekly salary.

There is no legal requirement under the FLSA that workers must receive overtime pay simply because they worked more than eight hours in one day (although a few states require it). Nor is there anything that requires a worker to be paid on the spot for overtime. Nether the FLSA, an employer is allowed to calculate and pay overtime by the week—which can be any 168-hour period made upward of 7 consecutive 24-hour periods.

It is custom, not law, that determines that a workweek begins on Mon. However, the FLSA requires consistency. An employer cannot manipulate the offset of the workweek to avoid paying overtime.

As well, because of the nature of the work involved, common sense—and the law—both dictate that some jobs are exempt from the overtime pay requirements of the FLSA.

The nearly mutual of these jobs include:

• deputed employees of retail or service establishments

• some auto, truck, trailer, subcontract implement, boat, or aircraft workers

• railroad and air carrier employees, taxi drivers, sure employees of motor carriers, seamen and -women on American vessels, and local commitment employees

• announcers, news editors, and chief engineers of modest nonmetropolitan dissemination stations

• domestic service workers who live in their employers' residences

• employees of movement pic theaters, and

• farmworkers.

And, finally, some employees may be partially exempt from the Human action'due south overtime pay requirements. The near common of this hybrid type is an employee who works in a infirmary or residential care establishment who agrees to work a 14-day work period. However, these employees must be paid overtime premium pay for all hours worked over eight in a 24-hour interval or eighty in the 14-twenty-four hours work menstruation, whichever is the greater number of overtime hours.

TIP

Is it a bonus or a bludgeon? Some employers take tried to skirt the overtime pay requirements past labeling part of the pay received every bit a bonus. In fact, bonuses have a strict legal definition, being reserved only for money paid in improver to wages because of some extra effort y'all have fabricated on the job, every bit a reward for loyal service, or every bit a gift. While the term bonus has a grand band to it, exist skeptical if you receive 1 too often. And have the time to practice the math to detect whether the bonus is an apt description for the sum you receive—or a ploy to circumvent the laws requiring overtime pay.

Piece Rates and Commissions

People who piece of work on piece rates and commissions instead of by the clock have a more than complicated task in calculating their rates of pay.

For piece charge per unit workers, the regular wage rate may be calculated by averaging hourly piece rate earnings for the week. Calculating overtime is a bit trickier. Employees are entitled to an boosted one-half times the regular rate of pay for each hour worked over 40, plus the full slice work earnings.

Case: Max is an assembler in a photocopier mill who is paid a piece rate of 75 cents for each copier cover he installs. Ane week, he worked 40 hours and installed 400 covers, so his regular rate of pay for that week was $7.50 per hour (400 10 .75, divided by twoscore).

One of two alternatives may be used to determine Max's overtime pay:

• Increase the slice rate by 50% during the overtime hours. For example, Max's employer could raise his slice rate to $1.13 per copier cover (150% of $.75) for overtime hours.

• Estimate an boilerplate hourly wage and so utilize that estimated average to compute overtime.

Keep in listen that if the U.S. Labor Section investigates the legality of your pay charge per unit, information technology may require proof that whatever estimates used to calculate your pay are in line with the slice charge per unit pay you actually earned over a substantial time—ordinarily several months.

The methods for calculating and paying commissions vary tremendously. If yous accept questions almost whether your employer is complying with the wage laws on slice rates and commissions, telephone call or visit the nearest office of the Labor Section'south Wage and Hour Sectionalization.

Jobs Involving Tips

If y'all regularly work for tips, the tips you receive are not counted as office of your regular rate of pay when calculating overtime pay. Merely the wage that your employer has agreed to pay you counts; in well-nigh cases where people work for tips, that is the federal minimum wage. Of course, tip money that you receive beyond the minimum wage amount is yet taxable to you as income.

Instance: Lisa works equally a waitress for wages plus tips. Because she receives a substantial corporeality in tips, her employer is allowed to take a setoff, the hourly minimum set out in the police for tipped employees. Notwithstanding, her regular charge per unit of pay for calculating overtime pay under the FLSA standards is still the minimum wage corporeality.

1 week, Lisa worked 41 hours—ane 60 minutes of overtime. For that overtime 60 minutes, she must be paid one and one-half times the minimum wage amount, regardless of the tips she received during that hour.

Split Payscales

If your task involves different types of work for which unlike payscales have been established, you must calculate your regular charge per unit of pay for each category of work, then utilise the appropriate charge per unit to whatsoever overtime hours. The payscale that applies to the type of work you did during overtime hours is the ane on which you summate the time-and-a-half dominion.

Example: Matt works for a company that manages a large apartment complex. For landscaping work, he is paid $8 per hour. When he works every bit a baby-sit with the company'due south private security force for the complex, Matt gets $ten per hour. For payroll purposes, his workweek begins on Monday.

During ane calendar week in the bound, he worked viii hours a day, Monday through Friday, for a total of 40 hours with the landscaping crew. Just the landscaping crew does not work on weekends, and Matt needed some actress money, then he worked 8 hours on Sat with the security patrol. He took Sunday off.

Because the FLSA'due south overtime pay rules accept upshot simply subsequently an employee works 40 hours in i week, the eight overtime hours Matt worked with the security force were at the security patrol rate of $10 per hr. His overtime pay for that calendar week is $120 ($10 x viii ten ane

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Source: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/employee-rights-book/chapter2-3.html

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