Overtime Pay: How do I Know if my Employer Owes me Money?

October 5th, 2009. By Kristine B

Yeah, it sounds like a bad Whitney Houston flashback…”How will I know if he…” Whoa there—back on topic. Overtime pay? Good question. So that’s the focus of this week’s Pleading Ignorance.

If you’ve opened a newspaper lately—or looked at virtually any news website including our own recent post on 61 companies with OT pay issues—you’ll know one of the major issues in US courts right now is Overtime Pay—or more aptly, missing overtime pay from a lot of folks’ paychecks. What you might not have known is that overtime laws in the US are not as clear-cut as many people think. In fact, if you’re not getting overtime pay there’s still a chance you should be. How’s that? Read on…

Overtime in a Nutshell

Basically, overtime occurs when a person works more than a set amount of time either daily (over 8 hours in a day), or weekly (over 40 hours in a week). Overtime is regulated by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and by state laws. When both the state and the FLSA cover overtime, employers must go with whichever one holds the employer to the highest standards—essentially meaning whichever one provides the most pay to the employee (that’s good news for the employee).

When an employee works more than 8 hours in a day or 40 hours in a week—and let’s be honest, who hasn’t worked that much at some point—the employee is supposed to get 1.5 times her regular wage (that’s the “time and a half” everyone’s always talking about).

So, let’s say an employee makes $10 an hour and works 44 hours in a week. The employee should be paid $10 for the first 40 hours and $15 for the additional 4 hours.

Seems straightforward, no? But it’s not, because not everyone is eligible for overtime pay and that is where things can get kind of tricky, to put it mildly. 

Exempt and Non-Exempt Employees

The FLSA says that not everyone is entitled to overtime pay. Confusingly enough—of course the government won’t just be straightforward—they have phrased it so that Exempt employees are NOT eligible for overtime pay and Non-Exempt employees ARE eligible for overtime pay.

Got that? I’ll say it again. If you are not exempt—aka “Non-Exempt”—from overtime pay, you are actually eligible to be paid overtime. If you are Exempt from overtime pay, well, you won’t be getting any extra dollars for all those extra hours you work.

Now, figuring out if you are exempt or non-exempt is a battle-and-a-half, so pay close attention here (although I like to think you’ve been paying close attention all along).

There are three questions to ask to determine if you are eligible for overtime pay. In order to be Exempt from overtime pay (no extra money for you) you must answer “Yes,” to all three questions. Not just one or two of them, but all three. Seriously. ALL THREE.

1) Do you make at least $23,600 per year (or $455 per week)?

2) Are you paid salary?

3) Are your main job duties administrative, professional or executive?

If you said “Yes” to all three of those questions, then you are probably Exempt from overtime pay. If you said “No” to at least one of them, then there’s a good chance you should be getting overtime pay.

Now, here’s the other tricky part (and the reason I used “probably” in that earlier paragraph)—the question about job duties is not straightforward. A lot of people are given a fancy-schmancy job title—like Executive Administrative Manager in Charge of Facilitating Customer Relations, or some such thing. But when you look at what their actual job responsibilities are—maybe they’re customer service people working the phones at a call center—they should probably be getting overtime pay, too. They may think they’re “executive” or “administrative”, but really, they’re not, it just sort of looks like they are from their job title.

But, that’s for another time. In fact, that’s for the next Pleading Ignorance blog post, when I go more in-depth into what the Exemption tests are. Don’t worry; there won’t be a test at the end of this. But, there could be more money for you, if you discover that you should be getting overtime pay and are not.

Next time, Understanding the Exemption Questions: Why you shouldn’t just count on what your employer calls you to figure out whether you’re entitled to some OT pay; and why being “on salary” doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve kissed your overtime pay eligibility goodbye.

Tags: FLSA, Overtime, Overtime Pay, Pleading Ignorance

This was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Employment, Pleading Ignorance . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.