Wages & Hours

Final overtime rule: OT salary threshold to hit $58,656 on Jan. 1, with interim hike to $43,888 on July 1

04/23/2024

Exempt employees earning less than $58,656 per year on Jan. 1, 2025, will be entitled to overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours in a workweek under a long-awaited final rule issued April 23 by the Department of Labor.

New college grads can expect higher pay than last year

04/08/2024

With an overall projected average salary of $76,736, engineering graduates are expected to be the class of 2024’s top-paid majors. That is a 3.1% increase over last year’s projections.

Bill introduced to make 32-hour workweek the norm

03/25/2024

The Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to cut the standard workweek from 40 hours per week to 32.

DOL overtime rule advances to last step before becoming final

03/08/2024

The Department of Labor’s rule expanding access to overtime pay for an additional 3.6 million exempt employees is now under review by the Office of Management and Budget, the last step in the regulatory process before a final rule is issued.

DOL orders extra helpings of damages against restaurants

02/12/2024

The Depart of Labor is cracking down hard on restaurants that cheat workers out of tips and otherwise fail to pay them properly. On Feb. 7 alone, the DOL announced it had recovered more than $850,000 from eateries in Florida, Hawaii and Oregon.

Federal contractor? Beware DOL probes of wage-and-hour violations

02/05/2024

Department of Labor investigators are going after federal contractors that cheat employees out of pay and leave—and the DOL is winning. The latest example: On Jan. 29, the DOL announced it had recovered nearly $16 million in back wages and restored more than 24,700 paid sick-leave hours for more than 2,800 employees who worked for 62 contractors and subcontractors.

Docking pay for snow-day absences: When is it legal?

02/04/2024

The snow’s coming down pretty good and an exempt employee calls to say she can’t make it in today because her car is stuck. Can you deduct a full day’s pay from her salary for that missed day? What if she’s non-exempt? What if you close work because of bad weather? Here’s guidance—and a handy flowchart—to help you make the call.

Review compensation practices to identify potential sources of pay inequity

01/02/2024

Your employees probably no longer consider it taboo to discuss salaries and benefits with their co-workers and friends. That means they can easily tell how your compensation system compares with that of other employers. It also means they can easily spot inequities in how you pay employees up and down your org chart. If they determine that wage gaps exist, don’t be surprised if they decide to sue you for discrimination.

States considering tax incentives for employers that adopt four-day workweek

01/02/2024

Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of talk about the benefits and desirability of a four-day workweek. If that came to pass, it would fundamentally change a standard set in 1938, when the Fair Labor Standards Act established a 40-hour workweek as the norm for American workers.

Keep it Legal: Wage transparency may lower wages

12/22/2023

More employees—especially younger ones—are openly discussing their pay and even sharing industry or employer-specific information they have collected in comprehensive lists. Perhaps paradoxically, recent research out of Harvard seems to show that all this information collected and shared may actually suppress wages.