Thought Leadership

For regular readers of this blog, you know that my colleague, Tracey Truesdale, gave you some tips for properly paying employees in the event of a pandemic. That was on February 26, 2020. Since then, we’ve heard of employers sending entire offices of employees home […]

The anticipated spread of coronavirus in the U.S. has many employers revisiting their emergency response plans. Depending on guidance from public health officials, some employees may be directed to work from home, temporarily furloughed, or work a reduced schedule. Some […]

Q. We use the tip credit for servers who work in our restaurant. When service is slow, we ask our servers to pitch in with other jobs around the restaurant, like sweeping up the dining room and cleaning the restroom. […]

Q. Our company’s busy season is coming up, meaning we will be asking employees to work longer hours. Our non-exempt employees will all receive overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours in a week. Some of them will […]

Q. Our organization has a policy of paying employees who perform certain kinds of work outside of regular business hours at 1-1/2 times their regular hourly rates. Do we have to pay additional overtime pay for these hours? A. Maybe. The […]

Q. Our company would like to enter a team in a local 5K charity race to do some good for the community and provide some positive PR for the company. Do we have to pay employees for time spent in […]

Q. We offer free lunches to our food service employees. Can we count the cost of these lunches as part of our employees’ compensation? A. The short answer is yes, but as we all know, there’s no such thing as […]

Recently, two blog readers asked a question about the use of compensatory (comp) time in the private sector during a discussion about tracking exempt employees’ hours worked. One reader’s company tracked exempt employees’ hours worked, and permitted the employees to […]