Overtime FLSA lawsuits are cropping up by the dozens—what’s behind them? And more important, what can you do to protect yourself?
Which of your employees are exempt from being paid overtime? Which are not?
Although the exemption rules are clearly laid out by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), in each exemption category—executive, administrative, computer, professional, and outside sales—there is a gray area between positions that clearly qualify as exempt and those that clearly do not.
That gray ground can be expensive real estate! For lack of a better term, call it Lawsuit City. Who lives there?
Your best FLSA classification tools are job descriptions, and yours are already written. They’re there, by the hundreds, in BLR’s classic Job Descriptions Encyclopedia. Try it at no cost or risk.
Prewritten job descriptions in the Job Descriptions Encyclopedia now come with pay grades already attached. Try the program at no cost. Click to learn more.
Avoid the Temptation
Lesson to be learned here: There’s a certain temptation to classify any gray-area job as exempt—to think, ”Hey, we don’t have to pay overtime, what’s the problem with that?”
The problem is that it’s going to cost you in the end … big-time! Today’s employees know their rights and, if they don’t, there are plenty of lawyers to help them to figure it out. And the longer you wait to classify your jobs correctly, the more expensive the penalty can be.
In our next issue, we show you one expert’s recommended exemption evaluation chart, and cover an extraordinary tool for developing meaningful job descriptions—the basis for all exempt-nonexempt decisions.
