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Wages & Hours

Contractor can’t plaster over pay violations

12/08/2014
A plastering company in Ceres, California has agreed to patch things up with 208 current and former employees following a U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division investigation. The employees of Ace Commercial Plastering will receive $131,953 in back pay, the amount WHD concluded the company had sanded off their paychecks.

Exotic dancers win millions–and could take home even more

12/08/2014
Dancers at Rick’s Cabaret, a strip club in Midtown Manhattan, just collected more than $10 million following a federal court ruling, and could make even more if an ongoing lawsuit continues to go their way.

AT&T settles OT dispute

12/08/2014
AT&T Prime Communications, one of the nation’s largest cellphone plan providers, will pay $122,254 to 255 workers to settle charges it failed to pay them for overtime work.

Live from New York, it’s a seven-figure settlement

12/08/2014
NBC has agreed to settle Fair Labor Standards Act lawsuit filed by interns who worked on “Saturday Night Live.” The interns filed a class-action lawsuit against the network last year, alleging that NBC used interns in place paid workers, a practice the FLSA forbids.

Labor costs hold steady in ’12 Days of Christmas’

12/06/2014
More evidence that wages have flat-lined: The human capital costs involved in checking off every item on the “12 Days of Christmas” wish list barely budged this year, according to PNC Wealth Management.

When employees miss meal breaks, know how to handle pay

12/05/2014
In many businesses, employees occasionally must work through their regularly scheduled meal breaks. When this occurs, employers must either provide another time slot for their breaks or pay employees for the time worked. To properly handle meal breaks, employers must have a system in place that allows them to know when an employee is working through a meal break so that the time can be credited properly.

New rule on white-collar overtime pay pushed back to February

12/02/2014
Look for the Department of Labor to release a new proposed rule for paying overtime to white-collar workers in February 2015, a roll-back of the department’s original, self-imposed November deadline.

If an employee wants to earn less, not more, what could possibly be the legal risk?

11/19/2014
Q. Can we pay an employee minimum wage for a position that usually pays more? We have an applicant who doesn’t want to lose her pension benefits and can work for minimum wage yet still qualify to receive her pension. Should we have her make that request in writing?

IKEA announces 17% boost in its minimum wage

11/13/2014
Swedish ready-to-assemble furniture maker IKEA will soon give a pay raise averaging $1.59 per hour to its lowest-paid U.S. employees. The move, affecting about half the company’s workforce of 11,000, will raise IKEA’s average minimum wage to $10.76.

When ‘manager’ doesn’t manage, title doesn’t determine exempt status

11/13/2014
Just because an employee is called a supervisor and sometimes tells others what tasks to perform, that doesn’t mean she’s an exempt admin­­istrative or executive employee. It’s the actual duties performed day to day that count.