Essentially, employees barter their hours for an employer’s money. Somewhere along the way, the exchange rules can get a little ‘blurry’ and overlapping. To bring clarity to this dilemma, here are things to know about wage and hour law and your rights.
The most common wage laws are minimum wage, overtime laws, and fringe benefits. The wage and hour law is covered in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and varies from state to state in the U.S.
If you happen to be attending a training required by the employer, you have to be paid for the hours clocked in. Aside from that, if the training happens to be out of town, your employer is required to pay time spend on that as well.
Tips and Minimum Wage
As for tips, your employer may pay you less than minimum wage, if you earn from tips, depending on the state’s laws and how much you earn from tips. Generally, employers should pay the required federal minimum wage (more or less $7.25 per hour) or depend on the state’s requirement, whichever comes higher. However, say, the employee earns $30 monthly on tips (exclusively); the employer then can pay a lower minimum wage of $2.13 per hour. But this is only applicable if the worker’s wage including the tips can add up to the minimum wage earned per hour.
Overtime
When it comes to overtime pay, it is best to consult FLSA if your employer is covered by this. Next is to find if you are an exempt employee or non-exempt employee. An exempt employee has not entitled to overtime pay but a non-exempt employee is. ‘Administrative, executive or professional’ are those that supervise a team of employees and those who make high-level decisions for the company that falls under exempt employees thus will not be paid for overtime. Volunteers, newspaper deliverers, and employees that work on a small farm are some employees that get paid for overtime.
Wage and Hour Law
The wage and hour law is applicable from big corporations to small businesses. There’s no exempt. If an employer runs a small business with around six employees, employees still need to be paid the $7.25 per hour minimum wage as stated in the FLSA.
Under the wage and hour law, it is also pointed out that employers can require employees to work overtime with a legitimate reason to fire employees if they refuse (under the federal overtime law in FLSA). There will be no limits as to how many hours your employer may require you to do overtime as long as you are paid accordingly.
In cases where employees are required to come earlier before the official opening time of an establishment, under FSLA, this is already counted as paid time. If the employer refused to pay the required hourly fee, this is illegal and is a form of wage theft. Employers who refuse to acknowledge wage and hour law will be fined for damages.
There are many complexities involved in the wage and hour law. For further details, you can ask your trusted employment lawyer to further expound things to know about wage and hour.
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