Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
We’re having trouble getting our holiday pay policy clarified. If our employees don’t work on a holiday, they get paid straight time for their normal hours for the holiday. If they do work on a holiday, do they get time and one-half for the hours worked on the holiday plus the straight time holiday pay? […]
Under the California Labor Code, an employer that fails to provide employees with a required meal or rest period must pay the employee an extra hour’s pay. But a controversy is brewing over whether this remedy is a penalty or just wages. Why does it matter? To recover a penalty, an employee must file a […]
Did they change the mileage reimbursement amount again?
California employers have been looking forward to a new regulation that would add some flexibility to the law requiring meal and rest breaks for employees. But the wait will be longer than anticipated.
A jury in Alameda County has slapped Wal-Mart with a $172 million verdict for denying employees legally required lunch breaks. The verdict came in after just three days of juror deliberation, following a four-month trial in the class-action lawsuit, which filed back in 2002 against the retail giant. Wal-Mart has said it plans to appeal.
We are having a lot of trouble with employees—both exempt and nonexempt-who come to work late. Our attempts to deal with this haven’t been too successful. In some jobs like the assembly line, punctuality is critical-we can’t run the line without all the people there. In other cases, it doesn’t matter so much as far […]
I have a question about determining the exempt or nonexempt status of our lowest-level managers. We think they are exempt, but we’ve read about some pretty expensive lawsuits and want to avoid that. We classify these employees as exempt, and they seem happy enough with that designation. Most of them are eager to move up […]
One of our employees just quit-two weeks after finishing an expensive monthlong training program that we paid for. We also paid her salary while she was in training. Can we somehow force this ex-employee to reimburse us? Is there some way to set up a policy or contract with new trainees that protects us from […]
I need some help with the administrative exemption as it relates to IT workers. We are a software consulting firm. Each consultant works pretty independently, managing and doing work on their own projects directly with clients. Their work is a mix of upper-level tasks (systems analysis, training, project management) and lower-level tasks (installing upgrades and […]
I have a question about determining the exempt or nonexempt status of our lowest-level managers. We think they are exempt, but we’ve read about some pretty expensive lawsuits and want to avoid that. We classify these employees as exempt, and they seem happy enough with that designation. Most of them are eager to move up […]