No, I believe the law exists as I moved from California to North Carolina in December a couple years ago, and OT hours worked on Thanksgiving week in CA were paid differently than OT hours worked on Christmas week in NC with the same company. Simply changing states would not be enough for a massive corporation (about 270,000 employees) to suddenly decide to be petty one month to the next.
You can bet, however, that a company this big will have an HR department large enough to be a company in its own right, staffed with people who do nothing but ensure everything they do is legal in all 50 states, and that they’re not paying a penny more for anything that they have to.
I am usually the first to hop on the employee’s side but I have to agree with the employer here. You didn’t work 40 hours and so that isn’t overtime.
Does remind me of playing ‘gotcha’ with an employer when I was in college. They did an 80 hour per 2 weeks as overtime threshold. This caused me great pissedoffishness when I put in 60 hours one week and 20 the next and they said no overtime. I looked up the law and not only was the law 40 hours per week but is also specifically said 8 hours per day. Since I tended to work 4 days a week for more than 8 hours a day I brought this up to the company accountant.
At first he denied that was the law but I was not to be cowed. He then came back a few days later, gave me my overtime but said not to press on the 8 hour a day issue.
Well, I did and the owner of the company called me in, said he “liked my spunk” but if I was to press it I would be fired. Since this was a college gig I just let it go.
I think this is where my ‘pro-union’ mentality came from even though I have never been a part of one.
Sorry for being unclear. ‘They’ in the sentence you quoted refers to the company (or those that set company policy), not to the accountants or the HR people.
But I’d like someone to show me a state law that says it is illegal to pay someone above the minimum amount being discussed here. There are laws that set that as the minumum, but I don’t think they also set it as a maximum.
OK. I agree with that. I am not up on the details of various State laws but I know that they can be quirky. For example, in California you have to give an unpaid half hour meal break to hourly employees who work a full shift. It is not legal for the employee to work through that break and get that half hour paid (either as overtime or to get to leave early). They must take the break.
It’s not illegal anywhere. Labor laws always set a floor- you must pay at least $x per hour, you must pay overtime for more than some number of hours worked in a particular time period, you must provide at least a 30 minute break for a shift that lasts 6 hours, you must require that employees take that break , etc. And the floors can be different for different states- State A may require overtime for more than 8 hours worked in a day , while State B requires it for hours worked over 40 in a week, and State C ( which is probably California:)) can require it for any hours paid over 40. If a company has different policies in these three different states, it’s not because following State C’s mandate is illegal in States A&B . It’s because following State B’s mandate is illegal in A&C.
Payroll people don't have any choice but to follow company policy , and they may want you to think the company has no choice but to pay the minimum, but of course they can. The CEO doesn't get minimum wage, after all.
Unless they were requiring you to work 4 days a week for more than 8 hours a day while you would have preferred five 8 hour days, that might have been cutting off your nose to spite your face. I suspect that in whichever state that is, it’s difficult to get an employer to allow you to work four 10 hour days per week.
I know, having been a working college student myself, that you couldn’t afford to press this issue at the time. If you’d pressed it, they would have fired you and it would have been up to you to get a lawyer and prove that it was a wrongful termination. But it’s quite illegal to fire someone in retaliation for insisting the company adhere to state wage laws. If you’d at least reported him to the state labor board on your way out, you could have made things better for the people still working there (he’d get a fat fine and have to pay back wages to all of them AND you for all days where you worked 8+ hours and didn’t get OT pay).
Just something to think about if you still work in that state and face this again
I’m going to sneak this in here because I don’t want to start my own thread, but it’s another one of those “if you think THAT’S bad…” stories:
We have to turn in weekly timesheets. We are salary but have to fill the sheets out as if we are hourly. We don’t get paid overtime because we are salary. But – if we work 2 hours less than 40 hours in a week we have to turn in a leave form to get paid for those hours. This is taken out of either sick or vacation time. And if we work 6 hours more than 40 the very next week, we don’t get paid for that! Because we’re salary! Isn’t that special.
The boss can at his or her discretion, opt to give us “comp time” to compensate (i.e. we can take 6 hours off the next week). But they don’t have to if they don’t want to. Luckily I have one of the best bosses and she’ll let me do it. Because the exact same thing above happened to her and she was not amused. So she’s basically said eff the rules.
For other departments, morale has gotten very low. This is a recent change, implemented by a guy who was later fired for never showing up to work and for doctoring his timesheet. :smack:
While I agree with you in spirit, this was in North Dakota. He would have just bribed soemone to get them to forget it.
Not as corrupt as Montana back then (witness the MT dude roasting me about this in another thread :D) but, hell, if you are a little guy you have no rights out there. Can’t really blame the guy who would have accepted the bribe as his pay was so crappy he would have needed it to raise his family.
All of this would make good evidence, if you filed a complaint claiming that you were not actually being treated as ‘managerial or professional’ employees, but rather as hourly workers, and thus entitled to overtime.
