In April, the Illinois Department of Labor published new regulations regarding the expense reimbursement requirements in Section 9.5 of the Illinois Wage Payment and Collection Act. The Act requires an employer to reimburse an employee for “all necessary expenditures or losses incurred by the employee within the employee’s scope of employment and directly related
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New DOL Rule Adds Civil Penalties for Taking Employee Tips
By Bill Pokorny
In 2018, Congress added a provision to the Fair Labor Standards Act prohibiting employers from retaining employee tips or allowing managers or supervisors to participate in a tip pooling arrangement. Today, the U.S. Department of Labor announced a new final regulation in which the DOL asserts authority to penalize employers up to $1,100 per violation…
Even High Earning Supervisors Can Be Entitled to Overtime
By Bill Pokorny
Wage and hour law is full of traps for the unwary. Even compensation practices that are well-accepted across an entire industry can sometimes create huge headaches for employers in the face of a legal challenge. Case in point: A recent decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Hewitt v. Helix Energy Solutions Group,…
Illinois More than Doubles Penalties for Wage & Hour Violations
By Bill Pokorny
Wage and hour violations in Illinois just got a lot more expensive. On Friday, July 9, 2021, Governor Pritzker signed an amendment to the Illinois Wage Payment and Collection Act that increases the penalty for underpaying wages from 2% of the amount of the underpayment per month to 5%. That may not sound like a…
Pay Me Now, or Pay Me Later? Wages Paid for Anticipated Overtime are Excludable from Employees’ Regular Rate
The Department of Labor (“DOL”) released an opinion letter addressing whether certain overtime payments based on an expected number of hours may be credited towards the amount of overtime pay owed under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) and whether such overtime payments are excludable from the regular rate. The answer to both questions is…
DOL’s Joint Employer Test Ruled Illegal
By Erin Fowler & Bill Pokorny
On September 8, 2020, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York struck down portions of a January 2020 Final Rule issued by the Department of Labor. The Final Rule provided a new test for determining whether an entity is a joint employer with another entity under the Fair Labor Standards…
DOL Broadly Defines When a Summer Camp or Program is a Child’s Place of Care for FFCRA Leave
In Field Assistance Bulletin No. 2020-4, issued June 26, 2020, the United States Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, recognized a number of ways an employee can establish eligibility for Family First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) leave based on the closure of a summer camp or program that the employee claims would have…
DOL Withdraws Industry Lists from its Retail or Service Establishment Exemption Interpretative Rule
I believe most would agree, the Department of Labor’s (DOL) interpretative guidance typically provides useful insight to employers navigating often tricky wage and hour laws. This was not the case with the DOL’s decades-old guidance regarding whether an employer was a “retail or service establishment” and could claim an overtime exemption for certain employees paid…
DOL Green Lights Bonuses for Employees with Fluctuating Work Schedules
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has issued a final rule under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) expressly authorizing employers to offer bonuses, hazard pay, and other premiums to employees whose hours, and regular rate of pay, vary from week to week.
The final rule revises 29 CFR §778.114, which is the DOL regulation…
Walmart Takes Lead in Providing Paid Sick Leave in the Face of COVID-19
By Erin Fowler
For regular readers of this blog, you know that my colleague, Tracey Truesdale, gave you some tips for properly paying employees in the event of a pandemic. That was on February 26, 2020. Since then, we’ve heard of employers sending entire offices of employees home to telecommute, restricting travel, and cancelling social events in reaction to the spread of…