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Willful violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act carry much harsher, more costly penalties than inadvertent violations. Employers can avoid being labelled a willful violator by showing they made a good-faith effort to comply with the law.

The Department of Labor will no longer enforce its 2024 independent contractor rule, issued during the Biden administration, which favored classifying workers as employees. Instead, it will rewind the classification clock, emphasizing an old standard that makes it much easier to consider workers to be contractors.

If you have employees who work remotely at least some of the time, you know how difficult it is to track exactly what they are doing and when they’re doing it. That can be bad news if those employees are nonexempt. They must be paid for all work they perform—whether you knew they were working or not.

We have a comp-time policy, but we’re encountering some pushback from employees. They believe that any time worked over eight hours qualifies for comp time. How should we determine the threshold for comp-time eligibility?

Tempted to play loose with the overtime rules to save money on labor? Bad idea. You will attract the Department of Labor’s attention.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “time spent doing work not requested by the employer, but still allowed, is generally hours worked.” And if nonexempt employees work—whether it’s authorized or not—you must pay them for their time. Here’s how to stop abuse of unauthorized overtime.

It’s up to employers to make sure exempt employees perform the genuine duties of an exempt employee. Simply calling someone a manager, executive, professional or highly compensated worker isn’t enough. Their job as performed must meet the test, too.

When employers don’t understand wage-and-hour laws such as the Fair Labor Standards Act—or worse, when they try to circumvent that law—they can find themselves on the hook for potentially costly penalties. Even relatively small violations can quickly add up.

We are a small business that provides temporary staffing to hospitals in California. California law requires paying overtime when employees work more than eight hours in a workday. A hospital to which we supply workers has asked us if our employees can work four 10-hour shifts with no overtime instead of five eight-hour shifts. Can we agree to the hospital’s request?

Many states and municipalities have wage-and-hour laws that go beyond the mandates of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. The FLSA sets the floor for wage-and-hour rules, but states and cities are free to set standards that are more generous to employees.