New USDOL Wage Hour Administrator Issues Opinion Letter Finding Paralegals Can Be Exempt: A New Day Dawning!
Under the Trump Administration, there has been a return to the issuance of Opinion Letters which I have highly applauded. I also applaud the rather pro-employer stance that many of these Letters have reflected. Another example of both
I blogged last week about the back and forth on the new USDOL proposed salary threshold for exempt status, at approximately $35,000 per year. Well, the Democrats have now spoken on the issue and they propose raising the threshold to approximately $51,000 per year. Another great divide.
The proposed law is entitled the Restoring Overtime
Now that the USDOL has established $35,000 per year as the new threshold for exempt status, several groups have already taken shots at that new salary level. The deadline for comments has ended and we will see what happens. However, worker advocate groups have assailed the rule and urged the agency to revert back to
We have been waiting for the United States Department of Labor to announce its plan for toning down the overtime rule revisions implemented in the last administration, but stayed by federal courts, and to announce its own proposal. Now, that momentous event has happened—the agency announced yesterday it will set the salary threshold at $35,308
When will employers learn? They keep classifying retail Store Managers and Assistant Managers as exempt, when these workers are often misclassified, not intentionally, but because the nature of their duties often tends to undermine the primary duty test and render them non-exempt. Another example is a recent case where Store Managers have been granted conditional
The retail industry is notoriously prone to FLSA collective action misclassification lawsuits because there are many levels of management, especially so-called lower management, where the employees may/may not discharge actual/true supervisory powers. Another illustration of this principle has resulted in a large dollar settlement that will pay employees known as “sales team managers” a fairly
When an employer realizes that a certain classification or number of employees has been misclassified as exempt, the employer may do the right thing and, henceforth, treat those people as non-exempt and pay overtime accordingly. That corrective measure, however, leaves a gap because the workers can sue for overtime for the period preceding the change.
The issue of who is and who is not an independent contractor has exploded on the legal scene in recent years. Many agencies are honing in on this topic and I have, over the last five years, probably defended more than fifty audits, inspections and lawsuits involving this issue. Well, the landscape just got murkier,
It is vital for employers to remember that when non-exempt employees earn commissions, those commissions must be included in the computation of their regular rate when they work overtime. The inclusion of the commissions bumps up the regular rate a little but if this is not done, then these small amounts of money can quickly
The Fair Labor Standards Act is eighty years old this month and commentators strongly suggest that the law needs updating in many areas.
My colleague Tammy McCutchen stated that a complaint-driven mechanism defense should be engrafted into the FLSA. She stated that “I think employers should get the opportunity to avoid [some liability] by having