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Are you being paid correctly for your hard work? Every day, hundreds of thousands of employees lose out on their hard-earned wages from overtime violations. You deserve to be compensated fairly for your labor.
Don’t wait to protect your rights. Find more information now in a free, confidential consultation with our experienced workmans comp lawyers today. We can help you fight back.
Are you being paid fairly for your work? Every day, millions of hard-working Americans are cheated out of their earned wages by unscrupulous managers and business owners. Despite strong federal laws to protect the wages you’ve earned, wage and hour violations are shockingly common, stealing millions of dollars from workers every year.
You can fight back. If your wages are being stolen away, you have powerful legal rights. Your right to a fair day’s pay is protected by state and federal law.
These laws allow you to pursue back wages and financial compensation if you have been affected by a wage and hour violation. If your employer is cheating you, you can sue them for compensation.
Whether it’s a mistake or intentional, wage and hour violations are against the law. The Fair Labor Standards Act is the main federal law governing wage and hour regulations in the United States. Among other things, the Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA, guarantees the vast majority of American workers the minimum wage, currently set at $7.25 per hour. With few exceptions, every worker in the US is entitled to at least $7.25 for each hour of work.
The Fair Labor Standards Act also governs overtime wages in America. In America, overtime wages should be calculated as one-and-a-half times your normal rate of pay. Thus, if you usually make $12 an hour, your overtime wage should be $18 an hour. Overtime wages must be paid for all hours worked over 40 in a single workweek. That’s an important point – overtime is calculated on a weekly basis, not a daily basis.
Employers who break provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act can be held accountable. The Fair Labor Standards Act grants you the power to pursue the money you are owed by filing a private civil lawsuit on your own behalf. In most cases, pursuing legal action is the only way that workers can regain what they’ve lost out on to wage violations.
It should be clear at this point that the Fair Labor Standards Act provides rigorous protections for employees and rigorous standards for employers. In a perfect world, the strong protections of the FLSA would guarantee that every worker in America receives fair compensation for their labor. The reality, of course, is very different. Every day, hundreds of thousands of workers lose out on their hard-earned pay to wage and hour violations.
You can fight back. The FLSA provides you with an avenue of legal recourse if your employer is stealing from you. You may be eligible to pursue a private civil lawsuit against your employer, demanding accountability and back wages. This is your right as an American worker.
To learn more about your specific legal options given your individual circumstances, contact our experienced legal team today for a free, confidential consultation. We value your privacy. Everything you say to us will be maintained in the strictest of confidence.
The information we provide in a case review comes at no cost to you, and while we share general information regarding labor laws in the below section, consulting with our experienced attorneys may be the only way to know the specific options available to you.
Most American employees are covered under the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Some jobs are excluded from overtime protections through explicit provisions of the FLSA, while other jobs are excluded because they are covered by different labor laws.
Not all workers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act are entitled to overtime. Every worker whose job is covered by the FLSA is classified as either “exempt” or “non-exempt”; employees classified as exempt are not entitled to overtime pay, no matter how many hours they work in a single week.
Are you covered by the FLSA’s overtime protections? In most cases, that question comes down to the following three criteria. Note from the outset that you must meet all three of these criteria to be considered exempt. If you only meet two of the criteria, but not the third, you are likely entitled to overtime.
These are known as white-collar exemptions. To be exempt from the FLSA’s overtime provisions under one of the white-collar exemptions, you must fulfill job duties that can be classified as “executive,” “professional” or “administrative.”
In most cases, executives have a higher level of discretionary power than other employees. Their responsibilities often have a large impact on the quality of the workplace and the success of the business. To qualify as an executive, you must:
For the purposes of FLSA exemption status, teachers, physicians, lawyers, pharmacists, members of the clergy, engineers, architects, scientists and actuaries are all considered “professionals” under the law. Many creative employees, including actors, writers and musicians, are also considered to be professionals.
To qualify as a professional (or “learned professional”), you must:
Administrative employees serve as the engine that moves business operations. Examples include human resources employees, accountants, marketers, public relations workers, and network administrators. To qualify as an administrative employee, you must:
No matter which of these three categories you fall into, what you do at work is more important than what you’re called. Job titles don’t really matter much. As one example, a cashier who has been promoted to “store manager,” but has no impact on personnel decisions and spends most of their time at the cash register, would not be considered an “executive.”
Employee misclassification is almost certainly the most common wage and hour violation in America. Thousands of employees are misclassified as exempt “white collar” workers, even though they don’t fit the accurate definition. Sometimes, businesses make legitimate mistakes, accidentally classifying non-exempt workers as “executives,” “professionals” or administrators. In other cases, this is an intentional scheme to circumvent overtime laws.
In most cases, American workers are entitled to a minimum wage of at least $7.25 per hour for their work. As we’ve seen, many states have passed higher minimum wages, and you are always entitled to the higher of the two wages. There are, however, exceptions to these rules.
Employees who regularly make over $30 per month in tips are considered “tipped” employees by the US Labor Department’s Wage & Hour Division. In most states, employers are permitted to take a “tip credit” in paying tipped employees, reducing the cash wage paid to a tipped worker in accordance with the number of tips the employee received.
Under federal law, the lowest cash wage you can be paid as a tipped employee is $2.13 per hour. But here’s the trick – your cash wage and hourly tip rate must always add up to at least the federal minimum wage, $7.25 per hour. Note again that each state will have its own law on this subject, so your own tipped wage situation may be different.
The FLSA outlines specific regulations for workers under the age of 20. In most cases, employers are allowed to pay these young employees a lower wage, $4.25 per hour, but only for a limited amount of time. After 90 calendar days, employers are required to pay youth employees the full federal minimum wage or the applicable state minimum wage. If an employee turns 20 at some point during the 90-day period, their wage must be increased immediately upon the change of age.
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