Some of the requirements and limitations of the Act include the following:
Click here to view additional information about the Act provided by the IRS.
Do claims adjusters employed by insurance companies fall within the administrative exemption (Cal. Code Regs. tit. 8, section 11040) to the requirement that employees are entitled to overtime compensation?The Supreme Court's decision to grant review is good news for employers at least temporarily because the Court of Appeal's January 28, 2010 decision in Pellegrino II is no longer binding on lower courts and may not be cited as precedent.
Maybe there'd be no difference between 500 employees and 500,000 employees if they all had similar jobs, worked at the same half-billion square foot store and were supervised by teh same managers. But the half-million members of the majority's approved class held a multitude of jobs, at different levels of Wal-Mart's hierarchy, for variable lengths of time, in 3,400 stores, sprinkled across 50 states, with a kaleidoscope of supervisors (male and female), subject to a variety of regional policies that all differed depending on each class member's job, location and period of employment. Some thrived while others did poorly. They have little in common but their sex and this lawsuit.We are continuing to analyze the lengthy 139 page opinion and will update this blog once we have completed our analysis.
Today, the United States Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division officially launched a national public awareness campaign called “We Can Help.” According to the DOL, "this public awareness effort is intended to provide workers with information about their rights in the workplace and to educate them on how to seek the assistance of the Wage and Hour Division when they believe that they have been the subject of a violation." The DOL's new campaign includes a launch of a new web page called "We Can Help." The website includes links informing workers of federal wage and hour requirements, how to file complaints, and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).
The new public awareness program follows other steps taken by the DOL under the Obama Administration to strengthen the enforcement of federal labor standards. Earlier this year, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis released the administration’s proposed fiscal year 2011 budget for the DOL requesting $25 million for its Employee Misclassification Initiative, a multi-agency initiative to strengthen and coordinate federal and state efforts to enforce statutory prohibitions, and identify and deter employee misclassification as independent contractors.
On March 24th, the United States Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division made a significant change in its compliance assistance by moving from its longstanding practice of issuing fact specific opinion letters to issuing more general, across-the-board Administrator's Interpretations. The change is significant because it likely signals the DOL's intention to more aggressively establish its own interpretation of federal wage and hour laws.
According to the DOL, the move to Administrator Interpretations is being taken "to provide meaningful and comprehensive guidance and outreach to the broadest number of employers and employees." The DOL states that the Interpretations "will set forth a general interpretation of the law and regulations, applicable across-the-board to all those affected by the provision in issue [and that] guidance in this form will be useful in clarifying the law as it relates to an entire industry, a category of employees, or to all employees." The DOL does not intend to abandon opinion letters altogether, but will response to such requests "by providing references to statutes, regulations, interpretations and cases that are relevant to the specific request but without an analysis of the specific facts presented."
In a telling development of how the DOL may use the Interpretations, the DOL issued its first Interpretation under the new policy reversing its position on the exempt status of mortgage loan officers as "administrative" employees. Vacating an opinion letter issued by the DOL under the Bush Administration in 2006, Deputy Administrator Nancy J. Leppink concluded that employees performing the typical duties of a mortgage loan officer do not qualify as administrative employees exempt from the provisions of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. Click here to download and view a copy of the new Administrator’s Interpretation. We will provide in the coming days an analysis of that new interpretation.