Providing much needed guidance to industry employers still wrestling with fallout from the United States Department of Labor’s drastic reduction to the scope of the companionship exemption, District Court Judge Sandra S. Beckwith held this week that a home care agency properly relied on the temporary vacatur of the DOL’s new federal regulations in

The Fair Labor Standards Act exempts “employee[s] employed in agriculture” from its overtime requirement. Recently, the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit applied this exemption to the operations of an employer who “moved to the United States from his native France in 1992 to grow worms,” and affirmed the district court’s decision holding that

This month, two New York federal judges reviewing a claim of misclassification rejected a claim for overtime compensation, agreeing that a business properly classified two translators as independent contractors rather than as “employees” under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the New York Labor Law. See Mateo v. Universal Language Corp., 2015 U.S. Dist.

The United States Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Integrity Staffing clarified that, under the Portal-to-Portal Act, preliminary and postliminary tasks are not compensable even if potentially done for the employer’s benefit, provided they are not integral and indispensable to the job functions for which a person is hired. Applying this concept, a Maryland Federal Court

Division of supervisory duties among different classifications of exempt employees sometimes gives rise to claims that some or all of those managerial employees do not qualify for the executive exemption.  Analyzing and rejecting one such challenge, an Arkansas federal court recently concluded that “Team Leaders” at one of the nation’s largest frozen food processing

The “highly compensated” regulation is designed to relax the exempt status tests for the white collar exemptions for individuals who make more than $100,000 per year in total compensation.  29 C.F.R. § 541.601(a).  Nevertheless, challenges to exempt classification of such workers can arise, with the employee claiming he or she still was non-exempt based on

One common “joint employer” allegation which has been regularly rejected by courts is that a regional cable provider is a joint employer of its installation subcontractors’ employees or contractor installers, due to the alleged business or operational control the cable provider exerts over the subcontractor in how installation work is performed.  A Missouri