“When an employer, as here, decides to allow employees to retain some portion of an unused health insurance credit, it can permissibly structure the program to prop up the employee health plans without treating the full amount of the health credit as part of the FLSA regular rate of pay.”
Continue Reading Ninth Circuit: Health Insurance Opt-Out Fees Not Part of Regular Rate for Overtime Purposes

Reviving a security guard’s claim for overtime pay, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals recently reiterated that employers may not pay employees an artificially low regular rate of pay to avoid paying the proper amount of overtime. Thompson v. Regions Sec. Servs., Inc., 67 F.4th 1301 (11th Cir. 2023). The Eleventh Circuit oversees the

Affirming the dismissal of wage and hour claims against “big box” retailer Lowe’s, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that company bonuses, provided to employees following 2018 revisions to federal tax law, were rightly excluded from the “regular rate” used to calculate overtime compensation under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The Fourth Circuit

On the last day of 2020, the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) ushered out the year with two new Opinion Letters. These may be the final two Opinion Letters of the Trump Administration and perhaps the last two for a while, depending on whether the Biden Administration continues the

Continuing the practice it reinstituted about two years ago, on March 26, 2020 the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage Hour Division (WHD) issued three new opinion letters, each revolving around the “regular rate” that is used when calculating any overtime pay due to non-exempt employees for work performed in excess of 40 hours in a

Citing the interest expressed by “law firms, unions, and advocacy organizations, among others,” the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has extended the period for public comment on recently-issued Notices of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) regarding amendments to the regulations concerning determination of the “regular rate” of pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and to

Fixed payments made on other than an hourly basis to non-exempt (i.e., overtime eligible) workers often must be included in the regular rate of pay for purposes of calculating overtime.  One type of payment that may be excluded from the regular rate calculation is payment for “reasonable payments for travel expenses, or other

Uncertainty and litigation have ensued in the wake of the Department of Labor’s May 5, 2011 Final Rule regarding application of the fluctuating workweek method of overtime compensation (FWW) authorized by 29 CFR § 778.114, specifically the Rule’s commentary on the payment of incentive compensation to employees compensated via FWW.  In a thorough recent decision,