If you find yourself reclassifying your employees as non-exempt (from previously being exempt), then you could end up in deep legal doo-doo like the Michigan Bell Telephone Company.
Reason? It doesn’t take employees long to figure out that, if they’re doing the same jobs as exempt as when they were non-exempt, then they were probably cheated [...]
The Department of Labor (DOL), in issuing an updated regulatory agenda this past week, announced it was considering a major change in its approach to enforcement. Instead of letting businesses play what it called a "catch me if you can" game, the DOL said it will issue regulations requiring each company to develop and implement [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Even as the Department of Labor (DOL) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) begin scouring workplace records for the improper classification of employees as independent contractors, Congress is weighing in with patches to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to put some bite behind the bark.
Senator Sherrod Brown, D.-Ohio, has introduced the Employee Misclassification Protection Act [...]
No stranger to labor disputes or the courtroom, Wal-Mart has now been hit with a class-action gender bias lawsuit affecting as many as 1.5 million female employees.
In a close ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco voted 6 to 5 to certify class-action status. Wal-Mart immediately said it would appeal to the [...]
The California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE) had long made life complicated for employers in the state who wanted to bring on board unpaid interns, adding an extra five criteria to those spelled out in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
But all that has changed now that the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has [...]
A federal judge has dismissed claims against the Church of Scientology by a (former?) member who alleges she was forced to work 100-hour weeks for no pay under a billion-year contract for the religion’s elite Sea Organization, according to a report in The Baltimore Sun.
U.S. District Judge Dale Fischer issued a written order saying the [...]
The Department of Labor (DOL) and its Wage and Hour Division (WHD) are not only targeting independent contractor misclassification, but they’re also now coming after the misclassification–and misuse–of interns.
M. Patricia Smith, who went after New York employers for the misclassification of interns when she was that state’s labor secretary, is now heading up the campaign [...]
The Department of Labor (DOL) is launching a Wage and Hour (WHD) investigation of Denver area restaurants for compliance with overtime pay, working hours, and child labor, according to the local DOL office.
Chad Frasier, district director for the Wage and Hour Division in Denver, says that the restaurant industry has been targeted because of past [...]
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), operating on information from its Albany field office, has targeted the health care industry in New York state for investigation into the misclassification of workers and subsequent under-payment of overtime wages.
Underlying this effort is a finding by the department’s Albany district office that, during the past five years, almost [...]
The Paycheck Fairness Act now under consideration by the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee was introduced by then-Senator Hillary Clinton in January 2009. The House of Representatives approved its version shortly thereafter, and now, after a long hibernation, it has roared back to life in the Senate more than a year later.
For employers, it [...]
