General Wage & Hour Law News & Updates

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In class actions there is always a named plaintiff (or two or three, etc).  That person acts as the class representative and is the “flagship” for the entire case.  When that individual does something to jeopardize their status as such a “representative,” the entire case might go away.  That is precisely what happened in a…

Lately, there has been a lot of “action” from the USDOL on the thorny and misunderstood issue of travel time.  The agency has just issued another Opinion Letter that addresses the issue of whether employers must pay workers for travel time on days when they spend part of the day working from home and the…

I blogged the other day about a USDOL travel time Opinion Letter for the construction industry and foremen in that industry.  The employer seeking the advice posed three scenarios and wanted answers about the foremen and the laborers that also ride in the trucks.  In this installment, I look at the issue of compensable time…

Are two lawsuits better than one?  Not for the employer, I can tell you that.  A very interesting case is working its way through the federal courts now, where the US Department of Labor wants to take over a private lawsuit that has been filed alleging Fair Labor Standards Act violations.  The government is contending…

Last year, in August, the State of New Jersey enacted the Wage Theft Act (“WTA”) which strengthened the wage hour protections for employees across the State, including expanding the statute of limitations from two years to six years.  As might be expected, almost immediately, an enterprising plaintiff lawyer sought to amend his lawsuit to extend…

The FLSA contains a number of provisions that enable employers to manage, if not reduce, overtime costs.  One of these is called a pre-payment plan.  Under a Pre-Payment Plan, an employer pays anticipated overtime in advance in order to maintain the employee’s wage or salary level constant from pay period to pay period.  Excess payments…

A big part of being successful in a lawsuit, for the plaintiffs, and their lawyers, is the ability to collect on a judgment that they might actually secure.  I often represent small or, sometimes, struggling business in FLSA collective actions and Rule 23 class actions.  I see, time after time, plaintiff lawyers make totally outlandish…

When the USDOL self-reporting program was announced, I was highly skeptical. Even though there seemed to be assurances that no undue enforcement actions would be taken, it just did not seem that employers would voluntarily subject themselves to such government review. Evidently, I was right. The USDOL has announced that this voluntary compliance program, the…

The USDOL has been issuing a slew of Opinion Letters of late, under the stewardship of Cheryl M. Stanton, Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division. Many of these deal with bonus issues and how these payments can and should be used by employers vis-à-vis their obligations to be compliant with the FLSA. The agency…

The last several years have been quite worrisome to me, as a management side practitioner, on the issue of USDOL agency-initiated liquidated damages assessments. It used to be that only when the USDOL took an entity to court did it seek liquidated damages. Then, some years ago, during the Obama Administration, the agency began seeking…