Posted on 05-Mar-10 by The Timekeeper

Challenging Conventional Wisdom

Thanks to True Slant for bringing this to my attention…

One of the common arguments about why unions, increased business regulation and universal health care are bad is that they’re supposedly a drag on the econonmy and it’s believed they will cause unemployment to rise as businesses lay off workers they can’t afford to keep any more.

Some folks like to cite high unemployment rates in Europe as proof.

Problem is, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, there are only three European countries among the major Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations that have highter unemployment than the U.S. — Spain, Ireland and France. Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy all have lower unemployment than we do, despite also having government sponsored universal health care, strong unions and (thanks to the E.U. and all its rules) a relatively stringent business regulatory environment.

Et Tu, Lawyers?

From the “even lawyers don’t know everything” department…

The intellectual property law firm of Turocy & Watson has been charged with wage-and-hour violations, accused of misclassifying legal secretary Karla Osolin and approximately 40 others in order to avoid paying overtime.

According to attorney Mark Tabakman, a labor and employment partner at Fox Rothschild who is not involved in the Turocy & Watson case, it’s not unusual for law firms to make this kind of mistake.

“What law firms can learn is what any other employer should be aware of: It should properly classify employees as exempt and non exempt. I’ve seen it in a few law firms — I see it in a lot of companies — that they believe erroneously that paying someone a salary automatically exempts them from overtime. It doesn’t,” he said.

Just goes to show you.

Deliver Us From Illegal Practices

According to the blog of attorney Leonard Leeds “In November, the New York State Department of Labor, in a random sweep of 25 restaurants in Park Slope, Brooklyn, found that only two employers were not violating wage and hour laws. It also found that 207 workers were underpaid by almost $1 million in total. Most delivery workers surveyed were found to work around 70 hours per week while only receiving a weekly salary ranging from $210 to $275.”

Combine this news with the findings in the recently-released Behind the Kitchen Door report about the state of wage-and-hour in the restaurant industry in Chicago, and work life sounds pretty bleak for restaurant workers.

Hospital, Heal Thyself

New Liberty Hospital Corp. in Kansas City recently ended up paying over $282,000 in back wages to over 1,000 employees.

The Liberty Hospital time and attendance tracking system had evidently been configured to automatically deduct 30 mintues from each employees’ time for lunch. The problem with this was pretty much the same problem encountered by any employee who tries to automatically deduct for lunch and/or breaks: what happens when the employee doesn’t actually take the break?

In the case of Liberty Hospital, it was alleged they went ahead and deducted the time anyway. Employees also claimed the company failed to count time worked before the official start or after the official end of the shift unless that time exceeded 12 minutes.

(Actually, rounding is acceptable, as long as it doesn’t exceed 15 minutes and it’s computed consistenly in both directions, not always in favor of the employer. But deducting lunch when the employee didn’t take lunch is always unacceptable.)

While it might seem that programming an automatic lunch deduction into the system would save time and eliminate the necessity for employees to clock out when they go to lunch and clock back in when they return… in the end, those automatic deductions might be more trouble than they’re worth. Especially in a business such as a hospital, where employees may frequently get called away from lunch, necessitating manual adjustment to keep from deducting for “lunch” time they were actually working.

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