Tag Archives: minimum wage

“Do As We Say, Not As We Do”: The Lesson for Employers from the Shutdown

As the federal government’s shutdown nears the end of its third week, one has to wonder why many federal employees are required to work even when they aren’t being paid. Could you as a private employer ever require your employees to work without pay during a crisis period at your business? Of course not.

About half of the 800,000-strong federal workforce is sitting at home worrying about their finances because they are “furloughed”. At least that group is not performing any work, so being unpaid is legal, although obviously unacceptable for their financial security.

The other half, those whose jobs involve public health and safety, are required to report to work even though Congress has not appropriated any money to pay their salaries. FBI agents, air traffic controllers, TSA agents, the Coast Guard, and, ironically, Border Patrol officers, are all working without pay right now. If one of these essential employees refuses to report to work because of the lack of compensation, he/she will be considered absent without leave and faces disciplinary action.

Most federal employees are on biweekly pay, so on Friday, January 11, the bulk of that workforce will receive nothing for work performed December 23 through January 4. No money for rent, food, transportation, etc., will be available to those workers until both houses of Congress pass funding legislation and the President signs it.

A federal shutdown has never lasted more than three weeks before, so the fact that the shutdown is dragging on and there are no positive signs of an agreement right now is obviously distressing to these employees, many of whom are poorly compensated and live paycheck to paycheck.

The federal government is unique in its ability to require this kind of unpaid servitude of its employees. As the Atlantic recently explained:

Since the enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, federal employees have been legally prohibited from striking. That law was intended to prevent public-sector workers from leveraging a work stoppage that could cripple the U.S. government or major industries in negotiations for better pay, working conditions, and benefits. But it likely did not envision a scenario where the government would require its employees to work without paying them, as is the case now.

What prevents you as a private employer from taking a play from this playbook and requiring your employees to work without pay when your business has a cash flow problem?

Continue reading “Do As We Say, Not As We Do”: The Lesson for Employers from the Shutdown

Five Tips for Hiring Teenagers

Summer is coming, and you may be thinking about employing some teenagers. Here’s some lawyerly advice: proceed with caution. Employing teens requires you as an employer to foresee potential problems and correct them very early.

Here are five tips for hiring teens:

1. Safety: You have to be much more safety-conscious when you employ teens. In 2014, workers ages 15-19 had more than twice as many injuries that sent them to the emergency room than employees over age 25.

Your company has a legal duty, according to OSHA, to provide a safe working environment for all employees, which means you need to engage in extensive safety training with new teen employees. Cover the most common workplace hazards and injuries such as slips, trips and falls, chemical exposure, burns and cuts, eye injuries, machinery malfunctions, and strains and sprains, as well as any known hazards specific to your workplace.

Remember that teenagers are often uncomfortable acknowledging their ignorance or inexperience, so they may not ask questions that would indicate that they don’t clearly comprehend your training or instructions. They also may not learn without extensive repetition of the rules. Don’t assume that stating a safety rule one time is going to sufficiently train a teen worker.

2. Sexual Harassment: Many recent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforcement actions have shown that teenagers are very vulnerable when it comes to sexual harassment. They need as much if not more training than your more mature employees in how to recognize, prevent and report harassment, even if the job is not considered long term for that teen. Continue reading Five Tips for Hiring Teenagers

Strange Exemptions to the Overtime Law

The new overtime regulations are causing employers to take a closer look at the executive, administrative and professional exemptions from overtime, but did you know that there are a number of strange exemptions that allow you to pay specific employees on a salary and not worry about overtime pay?

These obscure exemptions may have more to do with the strength of certain industry lobbyists back in the 1940’s when the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) was passed than they do with any logical reason for exempting these employees. But they are still on the books and may allow a few employers to avoid the rush to reclassify salaried employees by December 1, 2016, when the new overtime rules take effect.

Employees of certain seasonal amusement parks or recreational venues, for example, don’t have to be paid overtime or minimum wage. To qualify, the amusement park generally can’t be in business any longer than seven months of the year, or if it is, be affected so that at least six months of the year, its receipts are cut to 2/3s of the receipts in the six good months. All of the amusement park’s employees are exempt, not just the ride operators and the food concessionaires, but also the accounting, human resources and management personnel, but only as long as they work in the park and not in a corporate office that runs several seasonal parks. How is that for an arcane exemption that won’t help 99% of employers, but could be very important if you own Wonderland Park or a miniature golf course?

Similarly, there are overtime (but not minimum wage) exemptions from the FLSA for these employees: Continue reading Strange Exemptions to the Overtime Law