Can My Employer Tell Me Not To Count My Money

The Off-white Labor Standards Deed (FLSA) guarantees a number of rights, primarily aimed at ensuring that workers get paid adequately for the fourth dimension they piece of work.

Employers must pay all covered employees not less than the minimum wage—currently prepare at $7.25 an hr.

Some states have established a minimum wage that is higher than the federal ane—and you are entitled to the higher rate if your state allows for one. Employers not covered by the FLSA, such as small farm owners, are required to pay all workers the state minimum wage rate. (For information on your country's minimum wage law, see Wage and 60 minutes Laws By State.)

The FLSA does not require any specific payment organization, so employers may base pay on fourth dimension at work, piece rates, or some other measurement. In all cases, however, an employee's pay divided by the hours worked during the pay period must equal or exceed the minimum wage.

Some employers either become confused by the nuances and exceptions in the wage and hr law or they curve the rules to adapt their ain pocketbooks. Whatever the situation, y'all would do well to double-check your employer's math. A few simple rules distilled from the law may help.

• Hourly. Hourly employees must be paid minimum wage for all hours worked. Your employer cannot take an average or pay you less than minimum wage for some hours worked and more for others.

• Fixed charge per unit or salary. Employees paid at a fixed rate can check their wages by dividing the amount they are paid in a pay menses by the number of hours worked. The resulting average must be at least minimum wage.

• Commissions and piece rates. Your full pay divided past the number of hours you worked must average at least the minimum hourly wage rate.

Grade of Pay

Under the FLSA, the pay you receive must be in the grade of cash or something that tin can be readily converted into greenbacks or other legal forms of compensation, such as nutrient and lodging. Your employer cannot, for example, pay you with a coupon or token that can be spent merely at a store run past the employer. Employee discounts granted by employers do not count toward the minimum wage requirement.

Pay for Time Off

Neither the minimum wage section nor whatsoever other role of the FLSA requires employers to pay employees for fourth dimension off, such as holiday, holidays, or sick days. Although nigh employers provide full-time workers some paid fourth dimension off each year, the FLSA covers payment only for time spent at work.

Notwithstanding, some state laws mandate that employees get paid time off for jury duty, voting, and family and medical leave. A few states and local governments require employees to be paid for sick days or certain types of family leave, either by the employer or from a land fund. And many state laws provide that if employers offering paid vacation days off, employees are entitled to be paid for the portion they have already earned when they quit or are fired.

Tips

When employees routinely receive a minimum corporeality in tips equally part of their jobs—commonly, $xx to $xxx per calendar month as set out in country law—their employers are allowed to pay less than the minimum wage and credit the tips received against the minimum wage requirement. Notwithstanding, the employee's hourly wage plus the tips the employee actually earns must add upwardly to at least the minimum wage—or the employer has to make up the difference. (For more information, see Tips, Tip Pooling, and Tip Credits: What Service Employees Need to Know.)

Commissions

When people are paid commissions for sales, those commissions may take the place of wages. However, if the commissions exercise not equal the minimum wage, the FLSA requires the employer to make upwardly the difference.

Case: Julia, a salesperson in an electronics store, is paid a percent of the dollar volume of the sales she completes. During one dull week, she averaged merely $2 in commissions per hour. Nether the FLSA, her employer must pay her an boosted amount for each 60 minutes she worked through the showtime 40 hours of that week to equal the minimum wage, and more than for any overtime hours.

Equal Pay for Equal Work

Men and women who exercise the same task or jobs that require equal skill and responsibleness must be compensated with equal wages and benefits under a 1963 subpoena to the FLSA chosen the Equal Pay Act. (29 U.s.C. § 206.) Be aware, however, that some payment schemes that may expect discriminatory at first glance exercise not really violate the Equal Pay Act. The Deed allows disparate payments to men and women if they are based on:

• seniority systems

• merit systems

• systems measuring earnings by quantity or quality of product, such as a piece goods organization, or

• any factor other than sex—for case, salary differentials that stalk from unequal starting salaries based on differences in experience levels.

Although the Equal Pay Act basically covers the same employers and employees as the remainder of the FLSA, there is one important divergence: The Equal Pay Act also protects confronting discriminatory pay arrangements for executive, administrative, and professional employees—including administrators and teachers in simple and secondary schools.

Pay for Overtime

The FLSA does not limit the number of hours an employee may work in a week, unless the employee is a minor. But information technology does require that whatsoever covered worker who works more than xl hours in ane week must be paid at least i and one-half times his or her regular charge per unit of pay for every 60 minutes worked in backlog of 40.

In add-on to the FLSA overtime provisions, a number of country laws as well define how and when overtime must exist paid. Some states measure overtime on a daily, rather than weekly, basis. In these states, workers who put in more than viii hours a day are generally entitled to overtime, fifty-fifty if they work a total of 40 or fewer hours in a week. (To learn your country's overtime rules, select information technology from the listing at Wage and Hour Laws By Country.)

Hourly Pay

The math is unproblematic if you are paid by the 60 minutes.

EXAMPLE: Raymond works for a software shipping company at the wage of $8 per hr. When he works fifty hours in one week filling back orders in preparation for a national exhibition, Raymond must be paid $12 per 60 minutes for the final ten hours he worked that week.

Jody, who is vice president of the software shipping company and too Raymond's boss, also worked 50 hours the same calendar week. Since Jody qualifies as an executive then is exempt from the FLSA, she is not entitled to overtime pay, but receives her regular weekly salary.

At that place is no legal requirement under the FLSA that workers must receive overtime pay simply because they worked more than viii hours in ane day (although a few states require information technology). Nor is there anything that requires a worker to be paid on the spot for overtime. Under the FLSA, an employer is immune to calculate and pay overtime by the week—which tin can exist whatsoever 168-hr menstruum fabricated up of 7 consecutive 24-hour periods.

It is custom, non police force, that determines that a workweek begins on Monday. However, the FLSA requires consistency. An employer cannot manipulate the showtime of the workweek to avoid paying overtime.

As well, because of the nature of the work involved, common sense—and the law—both dictate that some jobs are exempt from the overtime pay requirements of the FLSA.

The most mutual of these jobs include:

• commissioned employees of retail or service establishments

• some machine, truck, trailer, farm implement, boat, or aircraft workers

• railroad and air carrier employees, taxi drivers, certain employees of motor carriers, seamen and -women on American vessels, and local delivery employees

• announcers, news editors, and chief engineers of small-scale nonmetropolitan broadcasting stations

• domestic service workers who live in their employers' residences

• employees of motion flick theaters, and

• farmworkers.

And, finally, some employees may exist partially exempt from the Deed's overtime pay requirements. The most common of this hybrid blazon is an employee who works in a infirmary or residential intendance establishment who agrees to piece of work a 14-day work menstruum. Still, these employees must exist paid overtime premium pay for all hours worked over eight in a day or eighty in the 14-day work period, whichever is the greater number of overtime hours.

TIP

Is it a bonus or a bludgeon? Some employers have tried to skirt the overtime pay requirements past labeling part of the pay received as a bonus. In fact, bonuses take a strict legal definition, being reserved only for money paid in addition to wages because of some extra effort you accept fabricated on the task, as a reward for loyal service, or as a gift. While the term bonus has a grand ring to it, be skeptical if you receive i too frequently. And accept the time to exercise the math to discover whether the bonus is an apt description for the sum you receive—or a ploy to circumvent the laws requiring overtime pay.

Slice Rates and Commissions

People who work on slice rates and commissions instead of by the clock have a more than complicated task in computing their rates of pay.

For piece rate workers, the regular wage rate may exist calculated by averaging hourly piece charge per unit earnings for the week. Calculating overtime is a flake trickier. Employees are entitled to an additional one-half times the regular rate of pay for each hr worked over 40, plus the full piece work earnings.

Case: Max is an assembler in a photocopier factory who is paid a piece rate of 75 cents for each copier encompass he installs. I week, he worked 40 hours and installed 400 covers, so his regular rate of pay for that week was $seven.50 per hour (400 x .75, divided by forty).

I of two alternatives may be used to determine Max's overtime pay:

• Increase the piece rate by fifty% during the overtime hours. For example, Max'due south employer could raise his piece rate to $1.13 per copier embrace (150% of $.75) for overtime hours.

• Estimate an boilerplate hourly wage and then use that estimated average to compute overtime.

Keep in mind that if the U.Southward. Labor Department investigates the legality of your pay rate, it may require proof that any estimates used to calculate your pay are in line with the piece rate pay you actually earned over a substantial fourth dimension—usually several months.

The methods for calculating and paying commissions vary tremendously. If you take questions almost whether your employer is complying with the wage laws on piece rates and commissions, telephone call or visit the nearest part of the Labor Department's Wage and Hr Division.

Jobs Involving Tips

If y'all regularly work for tips, the tips you receive are not counted as role of your regular charge per unit of pay when computing overtime pay. Simply the wage that your employer has agreed to pay you counts; in most cases where people work for tips, that is the federal minimum wage. Of class, tip money that you receive beyond the minimum wage amount is withal taxable to you as income.

Instance: Lisa works as a waitress for wages plus tips. Because she receives a substantial amount in tips, her employer is allowed to take a setoff, the hourly minimum set out in the law for tipped employees. All the same, her regular rate of pay for computing overtime pay under the FLSA standards is withal the minimum wage amount.

One week, Lisa worked 41 hours—one hour of overtime. For that overtime hr, she must be paid i and one-half times the minimum wage amount, regardless of the tips she received during that hour.

Carve up Payscales

If your job involves different types of work for which different payscales have been established, you lot must summate your regular charge per unit of pay for each category of work, then utilise the appropriate rate to any overtime hours. The payscale that applies to the type of work you did during overtime hours is the one on which yous summate the time-and-a-half dominion.

EXAMPLE: Matt works for a company that manages a large apartment circuitous. For landscaping work, he is paid $8 per hr. When he works as a guard with the company's private security force for the complex, Matt gets $10 per hour. For payroll purposes, his workweek begins on Mon.

During 1 calendar week in the spring, he worked 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday, for a total of 40 hours with the landscaping crew. But the landscaping crew does not work on weekends, and Matt needed some actress money, so he worked viii hours on Sat with the security patrol. He took Dominicus off.

Because the FLSA's overtime pay rules take effect simply after an employee works 40 hours in one week, the viii overtime hours Matt worked with the security force were at the security patrol rate of $10 per hour. His overtime pay for that week is $120 ($10 x viii x 1

Source: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/employee-rights-book/chapter2-3.html

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