Most employees are entitled to be paid overtime for any hours worked
over 40 in one week (and no, your employer can't average two or more
weeks together). Unless you work for a tiny and purely local employer,
or fall within a specific exemption, your employer is legally required to pay you time and a half for all overtime worked.
But some employers, in an attempt to cut costs, are using tricks to avoid paying overtime. As reported by AOL Jobs and USA Today, the number of lawsuits filed by employees alleging that they were owed overtime pay is skyrocketing; there was a 32 percent increase last year, compared to 2008.
As an employment attorney, I've seen lots of maneuvers, but below are
the 10 most common tactics that I've seen employers use to cheat workers
out of their hard-earned overtime pay:
To read more, see my article on AOL Jobs.
Hi Donna,
ReplyDeleteGreat post as usual! More ways to cheat on OT include: not including performance bonus pay when calculating the regular hourly rate, otherwise known as "shaving the rate." Also common, forcing employees to charge their vacation bank (even if they don't take time off) so that hours recorded as worked stay under the 40 hour threshhold. And there's comp time, which you may have mentioned. Comp time is especially common at smaller companies, where company owners often claim they can't afford to pay overtime, and offer comp time instead. If you get 1.5 hours of time off for every 1 hour of OT you worked, it's a pretty fair trade (but probably still illegal in CA, WA, MA, NJ, NY and a few other states).
If you don't get paid all of your OT, you are very likely being cheated in other ways, too. Pay statement violations (not including required info on your paycheck stubs), pay schedule violations (if you don't have regular pay days, or your pay date is more than the allowed number of days after the end of the pay period, etc.) and vacation pay computation volations are all frequently found when an employee isn't being paid OT properly.
I really don't understand how wage & hour violations are so rampant. Wage claims are easy to bring and easier to prove. They're the low hanging fruit of employment litigation. In CA, you don't even have to get class certification to bring class wage claims. EPL insurers refuse to cover wage & hour damages at all anymore, because the likelihood if getting sued and losing is so high. Liability exposure is real, and in some cases personal liabilty and even criminal penalties can attach. Aside from the immorality of not paying people fairly for their work, is it really worth the risk, just to save a few bucks??
Hi Susan. There are so many ways employees get ripped off. Thanks for your additional explanation.
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