Wage and hour class action litigation has now outstripped all other employment-related litigation--and no wonder, because fully 80 percent of all employers aren't in compliance with the FLSA.That was the message of Tammy McCutcheon and Lee Schreter, shareholders at Littler-Mendelson, in a recent SHRM webcast.
Are your supervisors and managers adequately trained on wage and hour issues? If not, they could be violating provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and putting your company at risk for costly lawsuits.
Wage and hour rules continue to be a challenging area of workplace law to navigate,
judging by the questions employers asked during a recent BLR audio conference.
The consequences of breaking overtime-exemption rules are so great that employers
should see audits as a necessity, according to two experts who recently presented
a BLR audio conference.
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) contains several exemptions from provisions
entitling workers to overtime, but if taken to court, the burden of proof is
on the employer to prove that employees fall within these exemptions—and
the courts construe the exemptions very narrowly.
While it is clear that whistleblower provisions protect employees who
go outside the workplace and institute judicial proceedings or attempt to have
a regulatory agency institute proceedings against the employer,
do they also protect employees
who make informal complaints to supervisors within the workplace?
Pharmacists employed by Wal-Mart claimed that they were not
paid on a "salary-basis" because
of Wal-Mart's practice of prospectively making adjustments in salary, with
a like adjustment in scheduled hours, to accommodate Wal-Mart's business
needs.
What you think of the recently enacted Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) will depend a lot on where you sit. If yours is a small-to-mid-sized firm, you're likely to be...
In a recent BLR survey, employers told us how the recently revised Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) overtime regulations have affected them, and what actions they have taken to bring their companies into compliance with the law.
