Tag Archives: FLSA

Holiday Gifts and Bonuses Can Trip Up Employers

Compensation, , , , , , , , ,

Employers are generous but sometimes uninformed in December, handing out holiday gifts and bonuses without realizing the legal consequences. As an employer, you have to consider the tax and compensation consequences of your gifts. Bah Humbug!

The Fair Labor Standards Act divides bonuses into two categories: discretionary and non-discretionary. Discretionary bonuses must be decided in the employer’s sole discretion. They cannot be earned by any formula or used as a motivator or incentive. If they are truly discretionary (which is up to the employer to prove), cash bonuses do not have to be rolled into an hourly employee’s regular rate of pay on which overtime is calculated.

Holiday bonuses may be discretionary if they just fall like manna from heaven onto the employee without the employee knowingly working towards the bonus.   Generally, the amounts, timing and basis for the discretionary bonus should not be announced in advance to avoid the appearance of being an incentive.

If the holiday bonus is earned by the employee by meeting certain announced criteria, Continue reading Holiday Gifts and Bonuses Can Trip Up Employers →

Workplace Posters For Free Online

There are companies that want to sell you expensive workplace posters that you don’t need to purchase because they are available for free online. Many employers are afraid that they don’t know which employment notices must be visible in the workplace, so they fall for the marketing pitch to pay for these expensive commercial posters.

As a Texas employer, have you received advertising in the mail similar to the notice pictured here? Such notices appear official, and can feel almost threatening, with warnings of penalties and fines associated with an employer failing to post current state and federal employment posters in the workplace.

Employment Poster Solicitation

It is not necessary for a Texas employer to pay $84 for the poster offered here. While it is true that posting certain notices and information is legally required, employers need not pay any company for this information. Free copies of the required posters can be found from the websites of each of the federal or Texas agencies that require them. The Texas Workforce Commission has graciously gathered a list of these posters into one place for you here.

Not only are you out the money if you buy one of these expensive posters, but these for-profit posters could actually hurt you if they promise rights to your employees that the law does not give them (such as promising Family and Medical Leave rights if the company has less than 50 employees and isn’t required to provide Family and Medical Leave). You don’t want to obligate yourself to things the law doesn’t require you to provide. The poster “invoice” pictured here didn’t ask the size of the employer’s workforce and apparently was not tailored to the laws to which a particular employer was subject.

As of August 2015, the posters that you as a Texas employer must have on your bulletin board, depending on the size of your workforce, are as follows: Continue reading Workplace Posters For Free Online →

Salary Basis for FLSA Exemptions Raised Dramatically

Compensation, Documentation, Employee Rights, , , ,

Claiming that your employees are exempt from overtime is about to become much more difficult with release of new regulations this week by the U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”) under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”).

On June 29, 2015, President Obama announced that the DOL is issuing proposed rules that will probably go into effect in early 2016. Those proposed rules redefine which employees have to earn overtime on their hourly pay instead of being paid as an exempt salaried employee.

The result could be skyrocketing overtime costs and more frequent wage and hour suits against companies that fail to make this transition carefully.

The advantage for an employer of an FLSA exemption has always been that the employer doesn’t have to track that employee’s hours and doesn’t have to pay overtime wages of 1.5 times the hourly rate for anything over 40 hours worked in one workweek. That advantage will no longer be available to you as an employer in 2016 for those employees you pay less than $970 per week, which adds up to $50,440 per year. Continue reading Salary Basis for FLSA Exemptions Raised Dramatically →

The DOL’s Database of Investigations on Compensation

Compensation, , , ,

In a recently posted database, the federal Department of Labor (“DOL”) has allowed the public to see the companies who have been investigated for various violations of the laws the DOL enforces, including overtime violations, minimum wage violations and independent contractor violations.

I quickly scanned the records just for 2014-2015. During that time, more than 35 Amarillo businesses were investigated. Some employed just three or four people. Others employed more than 100. But there are some visible trends in the local DOL investigators’ handiwork.

Local preschools were put under the microscope because they often pay their teachers on salary rather than hourly, resulting in frequent Fair Labor Standards Act violations. Amarillo and Canyon hotels are a favorite target, often because they pay housekeeping personnel by the room, rather than by the hour. Amarillo restaurants were repeated targets because of common violations of the tip wage credit, which allows restaurants to include tips in the calculation of whether their employees are making minimum wage or because the restaurant paid employees on salary. Local construction companies, heating and air companies and plumbers showed up on the investigation list probably because their blue-collar workers were not paid overtime correctly, weren’t paid for their travel time, or were put on salary as supervisors when they regularly  performed labor that should have been paid hourly.

Other industries that were affected by the DOL’s local efforts in the last year included home healthcare, landscaping, retail, trucking, medical, automobile service and online companies.

What can you do in your business to assure that you are paying your employees correctly? This is a very complicated area of the law, but here are some quick generalities: Continue reading The DOL’s Database of Investigations on Compensation →

Paying Employees for After Hours Work

Compensation, Personnel Policies, , , ,

In the last three or four years, there have been several cases filed against employers by nonexempt (hourly) employees who claimed they worked more hours than they were paid for because they checked their work email accounts at home in the evening or they remotely accessed their work files and sent a document to a client or answered a supervisor’s questions after hours. Technology has made this type of work easy and acceptable, but it also has made us as employers sloppy about our pay practices.

Applying the Fair Labor Standards Act, which regulates overtime and minimum wages, has never been easy, but when an employee showed up at the office, punched a time clock at the beginning of the work day and again at the end, paying that employee correctly was simpler.  Nowadays, smartphones, flash drives, remote log-ins, texts, etc., have added a new layer of compliance issues to the FLSA. And attorneys who represent employees in wage and hour lawsuits are taking advantage of the complexity by bringing collective (class) actions against employers for failing to capture and compensate for the time employees spend using all of that technology outside of the office. These cases are very expensive because they court will always award the employee(s) two times their damages plus attorneys’ fees that often greatly exceed the damages.

Don’t stick your head in the sand on this issue and just hope you never get sued. At a minimum, you need a policy in writing addressing these issues. Tell your nonexempt employees that you never want them working “off the clock” and that you will pay them for any after hours work they perform. Let your employees know whether this kind of out of the office work is acceptable, or if not, be prepared to discipline your employees for performing it (but still pay them for it).