Overtime Rules, FLSA And The Supreme Court


March 27, 2023

Overtime Rules, FLSA And The Supreme Court

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is the federal law that governs the wage and hour requirements in your workplace. For example, it dictates when employees must be paid at least minimum wage and overtime. - typically, when an employee works over 40 hours in a workweek. The law provides some exemptions that allow employers to not pay overtime to certain classes of employees.

The interesting thing about this law in our experience is that the best employees are typically the worst offenders of the law. These are the people that volunteer to work late, but don’t care if they are on the clock. These are the employees who arrive early to get ready for the day, but don’t clock in until their assigned time. These are the employees who work through lunch and breaks, even though they are clocked out. It is also one of the few employment laws where employees cannot waive their rights. Even if an employee places her hand on a stack of employee policy manuals and swears that she does not want to be paid overtime, she cannot waive her rights to receive earned overtime.

This past week the United States Supreme Court released a decision dealing with the FLSA. In the case, an employee earned over $200,000 a year. The employer believed the employee was exempt from the FLSA’s overtime requirements since the employee was so highly compensated. The Court disagreed because the employee was not paid a salary, rather the employee was paid a daily rate. Bottom line – the employer is on the hook to pay overtime. Ouch!

BestDayHR speaks fluent FLSA so you don’t have to – we figure you have much more enjoyable things to spend your time on. If you are unsure if your employees are exempt or not under the law or if you need help creating or revising your job descriptions so they are FLSA compliant, please let us give you a hand.

BestDayHR has a tailor-made job description creator in our software. Rather than create, revise, and store your job descriptions in a filing cabinet or on your desktop, our Job Description tool is meant to keep all your job descriptions up-to-date and easy to find.

Your friends at BestDayHR