Wage & Hour Insights

Guidance & Solutions for Employers

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By: Franczek Radelet P.C.

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David Radelet
Erin Fowler
Franczek Radelet
Lindsey M. Marcus
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Mike Warner
Pete Land
Staci Ketay Rotman
Bill Pokorny

Latest from Wage & Hour Insights

Q. Our company’s busy season is coming up, meaning we will be asking employees to work longer hours. Our non-exempt employees will all receive overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours in a week. Some of them will actually end up earning more per week than some exempt employees. We would like to address this by offering extra pay to our exempt employees who work extended hours during the busy season. Can we…
There’s nothing like a looming deadline to prompt action. Back in August, Governor Rauner signed into law an amendment to the Illinois Wage Payment and Collection Act that, for the first time, requires Illinois employers to reimburse employees for reasonable expenditures or losses required in the course of their employment duties and that primarily benefit the employer. Because the new law takes effect January 1, 2019, we’ve been receiving quite a few questions from employers…
As mentioned previously here last summer, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage & Hour Division has brought back the Opinion Letter, the process previously used by attorneys and HR professionals to obtain guidance from the WHD. The DOL dropped the practice in 2010, but it has since been reinstated. Yesterday, on April 12, 2018, the WHD issued multiple Opinion Letters, including one addressing compensability of breaks covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). …
On Monday, April 9, 2018, the day before Equal Pay Day, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that employers cannot use an employee’s past salary to justify paying women less than men under the federal Equal Pay Act (EPA).  The Ninth Circuit’s decision in Rizo v. Yovino overruled prior holdings in the circuit that past salary is a “factor other than sex” that employers could use to justify a pay gap between men and…
If you’ve been paying attention to the news relating to wage and hour law (and really, who isn’t?), you may recently have heard quite a bit about new federal rules on tipped employees, and more recently Congress stepping in with new legislation. There has been a lot of rhetoric on all sides, though not always a lot of clarity, so here is a summary of what employers need to know about the new rules. What…
Earlier today (April 2, 2018), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that auto service advisers (also commonly referred to as “service writers”) are exempt from overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”).  Today’s ruling in Encino Motorcars LLC  v. Navarro et. al. has affirmatively answered the long-standing question as to whether auto service advisers are covered by the FLSA’s “salesman” overtime exemption, which includes “any salesman, partsman or mechanic primarily engaged in selling or…
You may have read about the U.S. Department of Labor’s new “Payroll Audit Independent Determination” or “PAID’’ pilot program. Under this program, the DOL invites employers to voluntarily audit their payroll practices and disclose any “non-compliant practices” to the DOL. The DOL then reviews the employer’s records and calculations of what is owed to employees, and tells the employer what it thinks the employer should pay. The employer then pays its employees, and employees sign…
There’s been plenty of press this week regarding the U.S. Department of Labor’s proposed rules governing employer treatment of tips. Commentators are debating whether the proposed changes are a sensible return to the four corners of the Fair Labor Standards Act or a cash-grab for the restaurant industry at the expense of workers. We’ll leave the economic and political analysis to others, but we do think that it’s important for employers to understand exactly what…
As my colleague Bill Pokorny reported back on August 31, a Texas District Court struck down the Obama Administration’s FLSA Overtime Exemption Rule, holding that the Department of Labor (DOL)  exceeded its authority by increasing the minimum salary for the Executive, Administrative, and Professional Exemptions to $913 per week. In a (somewhat) surprise move, on October 30, the DOL notified the District Court that it would be appealing the August order. Wait…what?! Why is the…
On September 28, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case in which the Court will be asked to decide whether the FLSA’s overtime exemption covering “any salesman, partsman, or mechanic primarily engaged in selling or servicing automobiles.” The case is Encino Motorcars v. Navarro, No. 16-1362. If this sounds like déjà vu to anyone, that’s because the Supreme Court heard and issued a ruling on this very same case in June 2016. As we…