Tag Archives: Minimum Wage

Assisted living facility pays more than $151,000 in back wages to 15 employees for violations of FLSA minimum wage and overtime provisions

Exceptional Enterprises, Inc.

Agency Name:  Wage & Hour Division (WHD), US Department of Labor

Release Number: 12-1483-ATL (276)

Release Date: July 26, 2012

   Exceptional Enterprises Inc. of Coalmont, Tennassee has paid $151,119 in back wages to 15 employees following a U.S. Department of Labor  (“DOL”) investigation that found violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s minimum wage and overtime provisions.

DOL’s Wage and Hour Division determined that the employer had been improperly deducting time for sleep from employees’ hours, resulting in minimum wage violations for the sleep time that was not compensated. The employer also failed to pay employees overtime compensation at one and one-half times their regular rates for hours worked beyond 40 in a week.

Under the FLSA, an employee who is required to be on duty for a period of fewer than 24 hours is considered to be working even if he or she is permitted to sleep or engage in other personal activities when not busy. An employee required to be on duty for 24 hours or more may agree with the employer to exclude from hours worked bona fide regularly scheduled sleeping periods of not more than eight hours. In this case, the employees were required to be on duty for fewer than 24 hours.

The FLSA also requires that covered, nonexempt employees be paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 for all hours worked, plus time and one-half their regular rates, including commissions, bonuses and incentive pay, for hours worked beyond 40 per week.

Exceptional Enterprises has agreed to comply with the FLSA in the future and will post required notices informing employees of their rights under federal labor laws.

If you are currently employed in an assisted living facility and believe that you have been denied minimum and/or overtime pay you should consult a labor  attorney to evaluate your potential case.

This post is intended to provide you with information about overtime and wage cases filed throughout the country by other law firms and the government. It serves to give you an idea of the types of issues which are currently being litigated by employment lawyers as well as those which have been “settled.”

As a courtesy to you, we are providing the court name, case number and date filed to facilitate your search for it on the federal PACER website. Current information regarding case status, parties and attorneys is available on PACER to anyone who opens an account with them.

Please also note that some cases we report on were initiated by the Department of Labor and then settled  without having been filed in Federal Court and thus will not be available on the PACER website. For these cases we generally provide a brief summary of the findings and results.

Please feel free to complete the form below for submission to our law firm if you would like more information about your possible employment claim.  A representative will review it and  contact you. Please allow one  business day for someone to contact you and if you do not hear back from us then  it is possible that we did not receive it. This is a FREE consultation and you will not be charged for this call. Also please be advised that, merely by submitting this form, no Attorney-Client relationship is formed with the law firm.  The ONLY way that an Attorney-Client relationship with  the Law Office of Rose H. Robbins is formed is by specifically written  agreement signed by you and the Law Office of Rose H. Robbins.  You must provide your name,  home  or cell phone number and your zip code and all remaining fields are optional.

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Filed under Assisted Living Facility Worker

Wage and Hour Division (WHD) Protects Certain Visa Holders

  Wage and Hour Division (WHD)  of  the United States Department of Labor Administers/Enforces Certain Major Laws such as:

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is the federal law commonly known for minimum wage, overtime pay, child labor, recordkeeping, and special minimum wage standards applicable to most private and public employees. FLSA provides the agency with civil and criminal remedies, and also includes provisions for individual employees to file private lawsuits. The 1989 Amendments to FLSA added a provision for civil money penalties (CMP) for repeated or willful minimum wage or overtime violations. (Since 1974, FLSA has contained a similar CMP provision for child labor violations.)

Wage and Hour has certain responsibilities under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). These include: (1) enforcement of the labor standards protections for certain temporary nonimmigrant workers admitted to the U.S. under several programs (D-1, Crewmembers; H-1B, Professional and Specialty Occupation Workers; H-1C, Nurses; H-2A Agricultural Workers); and (2) inspection for compliance with the employment eligibility verification recordkeeping requirements (I-9 reviews).

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Filed under D-1, Fair Labor Standards Act ["FLSA"], H-1B, H-1C, H-2A, H-2B, Undocumented Workers, Unpaid Overtime Wages

INCREASE IN WAGE AND HOUR LAWSUITS

More and more, employees unjustly denied wages and overtime pay are filing wage and hour theft lawsuits, and in many cases, they’ve had great success. According to The Department of Labor, in fiscal year 2008, more than 197,000 employees received a total of $140.2 million in minimum wage and overtime back wages. The majority of these violations involved unpaid overtime.

According to Kiplinger, the ten largest wage and hour lawsuit settlements in 2009 totaled  $363.6 million. These cases included:

* Wal-Mart Wage & Hour Employment Practices Litigation, $65 million. Workers alleged Wal-Mart intentionally altered payroll records to reduce labor cost. Continue reading

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Filed under Calculate Amount You May be Owed

What are the Overtime Pay Requirements of the FLSA?

What are the Overtime Pay Requirements of the FLSA ?

The following provides  general information concerning the application of the overtime pay provisions of the

FLSA.

Characteristics

An employer who requires or permits an employee to work overtime is generally required to pay the employee premium pay for such overtime work.

Requirements

Unless specifically exempted, employees covered by the Act must receive overtime pay for hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek at a rate not less than time and one-half their regular rates of pay. There is no limit in the Act on the number of hours employees aged 16 and older may work in any workweek. The Act does not require overtime pay for work on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, or regular days of rest, as such.

The Act applies on a workweek basis. An employee’s workweek is a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours — seven consecutive 24-hour periods. It need not coincide with the calendar week, but may begin on any day and at any hour of the day. Different workweeks may be established for different employees or groups of employees. Averaging of hours over two or more weeks is not permitted. Normally, overtime pay earned in a particular workweek must be paid on the regular pay day for the pay period in which the wages were earned.

The regular rate of pay cannot be less than the minimum wage. The regular rate includes all remuneration for employment except certain payments excluded by the Act itself. Payments which arc not part of the regular rate include pay for expenses incurred on the employer’s behalf, premium payments for overtime work or the true premiums paid for work on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, discretionary bonuses, gifts and payments in the nature of gifts on special occasions, and payments for occasional periods when no work is performed due to vacation, holidays, or illness. Continue reading

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Filed under minimum wage violations, Unpaid Overtime Wages

H-1B, H-2A, H-2B, H-3 and L visa holders are entitled to protection

Visa holders are entitled to enforce the terms and conditions of work they are offered at the time they accept their visas. Furthermore the Department of Labor establishes certain minimum work standards for visa recipients including payment of at least the prevailing wage in effect for the occupation and location where work is performed. Limits, which vary depending on the visa type, are placed on the costs that employers can impose on workers for obtaining visas and traveling to the United States. Visa holders who may have such claims include H-1B (Specialty occupations), H-2A (Temporary or seasonal agricultural workers), H-2B (Temporary or seasonal non-agricultural workers), H-3 (trainees), and L (intra-company transfers). The attorney investigating the claim should have a comprehensive understanding of the applicable immigration laws and how they intersect with FSLA and state wage laws.

Please use the form below to  contact our law office today for a free evaluation of your claim;

or send an email to: RobbinsLawOffice at me.com;

or call our office : (954) 946-8130

 We look forward to hearing from you and discussing your case with you.

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Filed under D-1, Fair Labor Standards Act ["FLSA"], H-1B, H-1C, H-2A, H-2B, minimum wage violations, Unpaid Overtime Wages