Overtime Labor Laws

The San Francisco grocery store chain Casa Guadalupe and its owner have agreed to pay more than $120,000 to settle a wage-and-hour lawsuit filed by the DOL. The owner admitted to investigators that he willfully failed to issue time-and-a-half overtime pay to employees who worked more than 40 hours in a week.

Three lessons from a pending lawsuit in Dallas: 1. If your employees work overtime, pay them for it. 2. Don’t falsify records to cover your tracks. 3. Don’t sell your business to some­­one who is suing you for stiffing them out of overtime.

Several construction companies working on a renovation of the student union ballroom on the Mankato campus of Minnesota State University will have to pay more than $38,000 in back overtime wages. To blame: overly generous scheduling practices.

If your business is small enough and local enough (meaning you don’t produce goods for interstate sale or perform work outside your own state), you may not have to follow the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.

Q. We are doing an internal review of our recordkeeping, and we realized that we track hours for our on-site transcriptionists but we have not been tracking the hours for our transcriptionists who work from home. The on-site employees are non­exempt and we pay them an hourly wage. However, the remote employees are paid piece rates—a certain rate for the number of words transcribed from dictation. Do we have to keep track of their hours?

The owners of Onward Construction in Queens have pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of failing to pay their employees. The company quit paying its seven workers in March 2011. In all, they owed workers $18,680 by the end of September 2012.

The Doubletree Hotel in Richardson has agreed to pay 112 employees $102,592 to settle charges it violated the Fair Labor Standards Act.

San Francisco-based First Republic Bank will pay $1,009,644 in overtime back wages to 392 employees in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Oregon. A DOL investigation revealed the bank incorrectly classified workers as exempt from the FLSA.

The Rite-Aid drugstore chain, based in Camp Hill, will end 14 different over­­time lawsuits with one huge settlement of more than $27 million. Plaintiffs had alleged the company misclassified assistant managers and co-managers to avoid paying them overtime.

Raleigh’s Dos Taquitos restaurant must fork over almost $50,000 in back pay to 26 employees the U.S. Department of Labor says were shortchanged.