On November 16, 2022, the Department of Labor announced that it had recovered $1.2 million in back wages from four different home health care agencies on behalf of 599 home healthcare workers. One of the responsible employers, Guardian Angels Care Services, Inc., owed $160,477 in overtime back wages for misclassifying its employees as independent
With the spectacular crash of the centralized cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the potential bankruptcy of a second high-profile cryptocurrency exchange called BlockFi, now is a good time to revisit whether an employer would want to pay or employees receives all or part of their wages in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency.
Let’s go back to
In a compromise between the City of San Antonio and a coalition of local San Antonio employers that sued to block the implementation of the new paid sick leave ordinance, the City agreed to postpone the effective date of the ordinance from August 1, 2019 until December 1, 2019. The state district judge hearing
The City of Dallas passed a paid sick leave ordinance requiring private employers to provide up to 64 hours of paid sick leave to employees working in the City. Barring court intervention, the law will take effect August 1, 2019. Here are the highlights of the ordinance:
The Texas Legislature ended its session last week without passing a bill that preempts municipalities from passing laws requiring private employers to provide paid sick leave to employees. Consequently, employers in Dallas and San Antonio must prepare for the implementation of the local paid sick leave laws that take effect August 1, 2019.
Dallas, San
Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the arbitration agreements that an interstate trucking company had with its independent contractor drivers. That case arose in the context of a class action wage and hour lawsuit brought by a group of independent contractor interstate truck drivers alleging that they were not properly paid. The company
I’m traveling for work this week but today’s Supreme Court opinion is one I have been waiting for all term. In Epic Systems v. Lewis, the Court held that arbitration agreements between employees and employers that require mandatory arbitration of disputes can also require that all disputes be arbitrated individually and not as a
One of the biggest criticisms I have of the FLSA is that it provides no safe harbor or protection for an employer, who having realized it made a wage and hour mistake, to voluntarily self-report and correct its mistake. Instead, it can encourage employers who learn of a potential FLSA violation that has not otherwise been discovered to continue its current practice hoping that the violation will not be discovered. This week the U.S. Department of Labor announced its Payroll Audit Independent Determination (PAID) program that takes a step in providing employers with an incentive to voluntarily identify and self-correct wage and hour violations. The stated purpose of the program is to
Continue Reading Department of Labor Rolls Out Pilot Program for Employers to Correct Inadvertent Wage and Hour Violations
The U.S. Department of Labor recently abandoned its six-factor internship test in favor of the seven-factor primary beneficiary test utilized by most Courts. The primary benefit test adopts a temporal limitation for the internship that was not in the old six-factor test and incorporates two elements linking eligibility to the intern’s education programs and academic
In Texas, an employer can satisfy its overtime obligation to nonexempt employees whose hours fluctuate from week-to-week and are paid on a salary basis, by using the fluctuating workweek (FWW) method of overtime compensation. Under the FWW, a nonexempt employee who has hours of work which fluctuate from week to week may be paid a