A recent settlement agreement between an employer and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) serves as a reminder that employers must consider all of an employee’s hours—regardless of where the work was performed—for overtime purposes.
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A restaurant with two locations in Arizona, Wally’s American Pub and Grille, has agreed to pay a total of $141,544 to 11 employees after DOL said it failed to properly calculate workers’ overtime pay.
When kitchen staff and servers worked at both locations during the same week, Wally’s did not add their hours together for overtime purposes, DOL determined during an investigation. “As a result, employees did not receive overtime pay at time and a half their regular hourly rates for the hours they worked beyond 40 in a workweek,” DOL said in a press release.
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires that all of an employee’s hours—even those performed at a different location—be counted toward the 40-hour workweek overtime threshold. Even if an employee is performing two different kinds of work with different pay rates, the hours must be combined.