When a company evaluates a position or job classification and decides (with a little prodding by the labor commission) to change it from salaried/exempt with no overtime pay to hourly with overtime pay, how often do they tend to pay people retroactively for their unpaid overtime?
Just wondering as we’ve been converted to hourly, and in the past, we’ve done lots of overtime, primarily in the form of after-hours support, and part of the process involved filling out a form where we list our start date and an estimate of how many hours of overtime we’ve worked in a week.
If they’re not planning on giving us anything for all that overtime that was apparently inappropriate, why else would they want the information?
They’re going to calculate what your total hourly wage was while you were salaried and that’s what you’ll be getting now. Except without overtime.
Or, alternatively, they track the “overtime” of the salaried employees as a means of using it to justify another employee - they’ve done that where I work. Past a certain number of 80 hours weeks they make a business case to hire another warm body.
Retroactive overtime is generally paid based on a complaint to wage & hour, or to avoid a complaint to wage & hour. If your change from exempt to non-exempt was not due to any change in the law or job duties, making a complaint (or credible threat of such) would possibly be an option. It probably wouldn’t endear you to your employer, although there would probably be some non-retaliation legal protection for those making a complaint. You mention the labor commission is already involved, so perhaps a complaint was already made, or they uncovered a problem during a regular audit.
We just went through this at my workplace not long ago. At the OPs workplace, they probably did an analysis of everyone’s job to determine whether it should be exempt or not and now they’re estimating back overtime. They’ll probably contact the OP and his/her present and past managers to get a picture of how much OT was worked, and whether it should be considered exempt or not. Then they’ll call you in with your boss and the HR rep, and they’ll tell you what figure they arrived at and how.
I’m pretty sure you can expect a payout. In making these changes of job classification, they are in effect admitting to an error which must be redressed.