Sobering Statistics
Posted on 06-Nov-09 by The Timekeeper
In a speech on November 5 to the Wimberly Lawson Employment Law Update Conference in Knoxville, TN, wage and hour specialist Carol Merchant offered some sobering wage and hour related statistics for small and mid sized business owners.
Ms. Merchant worked for the U.S. DOL for 33 years, and co-wrote the national training manual for investigators on developing litigation cases. So she knows whereof she speaks, and business owners would do well to listen up.
The New Landscape of Wage and Hour
For instance, those 250 new DOL wage and hour investigators you’ve heard about? To put the number in perspective, this represents a 33% increase in the number of inspectors. Couple that with what Ms. Merchant termed a “narrower interpretation of application of exemptions,” and you’re likely looking at a big increase in both the number of investigations and the number and amount of fines and penalties assessed by the US DOL.
And states are stepping up their enforcement efforts, as well.
One area to particularly keep in mind is overtime pay. Of the 28,242 DOL compliance actions in 2008, 88% of them were related to overtime issues.
Beyond that, the number of FLSA lawsuits has increased 77% since 2004.
If you have even a moderate number of employees, you’ve got yet another worry. In recent years the trend has been for more wage and hour class action suits to be filed than all other types of employment class action lawsuits combined.
Action Items
Make sure if you’ve classified someone as an independent contractor, they really are being treated as an independent contractor and not as an employee. Misclassification can get you in some really expensive hot water.
For employees, make sure you’re accurately tracking their time — and maintaining those time records over time — paying at least minimum wage and paying proper overtime.
If you haven’t consulted with your employment law advisor or conducted a wage and hour audit recently, now would probably be a good time to get a check up of your policies and procedures. I think it’s probably much better to find and fix on your own than to wait for one of those 250 eager, new DOL inspectors to show up on your door and discover issues for you, eh?
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