Wages & Hours

Snapshot: How much is that promotion worth?

08/21/2018

Average wages have grown just 2.8% since last year. But employees who won promotions saw their pay increase 8.7%.

Salaries flat in ’19, budgets increasing less than 3%

08/21/2018

As the job market continues to tighten, you’d think employers’ wallets would loosen up. But that’s not happening, at least not for broad increases in salary budgets.

Employees losing ground as inflation outstrips wage growth

08/14/2018

The “real wage” metric the federal government uses to gauge the average American’s take-home pay fell 2 cents in the last year, to $10.76 per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

New tip rules: Prepare for a deep dive into the tip pool

08/06/2018

Employers have long been allowed to pay tipped employees less than the usual minimum wage. In some industries, tips have traditionally been pooled, so “back-of-the-house” staff can share in customers’ generosity. But the informality of tipping means it is a surprisingly complicated wage-and-hour issue.

Snapshot: Salary budgets inch upward

07/31/2018

U.S. employers are expected to budget for pay raises averaging 3.2% in 2019.

Time clock rounding case offers lessons on compensable time

07/30/2018

If you use a rounding system, take care to ensure that it is fair and neutral, and that, on average, the amount of employee time that is deducted is the same or less than the amount added to time records as time worked.

Economy is booming, but when will wages rise?

07/17/2018

With low unemployment and a growing GDP, Americans are feeling much more comfortable about the economy. Yet a concerning trend lurks underneath an otherwise booming economy: slow wage growth.

Follow rules to set alternative workweek schedule

05/30/2018

California wage-and-hour law can be complicated. For example, California allows establishment of something called alternative workweek schedules. Employees have to approve an AWS by voting via a secret ballot.

Tip pooling: What’s fair and reasonable?

05/30/2018

Under California Labor Code section 351, employers may pool tips and distribute them in a manner that is “fair and reasonable.” What that means in practice depends on the circumstances.

Some DOL ‘prevailing wage’ scales based on data from the 1980s

05/29/2018

The U.S. Department of Labor, which is in charge of enforcing the Davis Bacon Act, is setting prevailing wages for some occupations based on data collected more than 30 years ago.