Labor laws for flat rate employees?

Question

Can anyone direct me to a website that can shed some light on this? My b/f works in autobody - "flat rate". The boss says he has authority to make these guys work 7am-7pm M-Saturday and maybe Sunday too! NO incentives to work all this overtime. NO bonus, no bonus time off, or any other incentives. Salaried employees get a yearly income that has nothing to do with the hours they work. Hourly rates get time and 1/2 for any hours worked past 40, double time on Sundays. Flat rate is paid by the job order. Each car has an approved amt of hours from each insurance company so if the car pays 36 hours but he gets it done in 21 hrs he's still paid 36 hrs for it. He did a job that only paid 16 hrs and it took 29 hrs to do it, so it all works out in the end but to add all this MANDATORY over time with NO incentives is crazy! He cleared 155 hours in two weeks just working his normal 40 hours a week. If he gets more than 200 hours the taxes are too much, he brings home LESS! What to do?

Answer 1

Contact the Wage and Hour Division of the US Department of Labor at 1-866-4US-WAGE. They enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). This is the federal law that sets minimum wage and overtime, etc. I suspect that your b/f's employer is claiming him as exempt from overtime under Section 7(i) of the FLSA (you can go on-line to www.dol.gov to look this up).

Basically, this exemption says that if you have an employee of a retail employer who has at least 51% of his total pay made up of commissions (which the flat rate system is a type of) AND, when you divide all his pay by all the hours actually worked to earn that pay (NOT the flat rate hours - the actual hours) it equals at least one and one-half times the minimum wage (currently, this would be at least $7.73 per hour) that employee would be exempt from receiving any additional overtime pay. If your b/f is earning less than that, there may be a violation, and the Wage Hour Division can help you decide what to do in that case. Either way, they can give you some good information to help you understand what's going on and what options you have available to you.

Incidentally, the FLSA does not, nor does any other federal law, put any limitation on the number of hours an employee can be required to work. So theoretically, your b/f could work 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, and as long as he was paid for it correctly, there wouldn't be any law that would prohibit an employer from requiring these kinds of hours.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Flat Rate Labor Laws

Answer 3

If the company is paying him a flat rate, it sound like they are making him a salaried exempt. In that case the 10 hours a week can not be mandatory, it could be more or less hours at the same rate of pay. He needs to verify how he is classified.