Have you ever wondered what the most common problems that turn up at the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour investigators are? Here they are:
- Salaried
employees, such as clerical workers and salespeople, who are not being paid overtime, but should be.- Teens who are doing jobs they shouldn’t be or working hours they shouldn’t be.
- Failure to pay employees for time spent completing paperwork, cleaning up or other duties that fall outside regular hours.
- Failure to maintain records for non-exempt, salaried employees.
- Employers giving time off (comp time) instead of overtime.
- Employers who consider certain employees to be on contract and thus they don’t treat them as covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
- Illegally making employees pay for uniforms, errors and other things that can reduce their pay below minimum wage or overtime rates.
- Failure to pay minimum wage or overtime to part-timers.
Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, D.C., August 1998.