Am I getting screwed out of overtime?

September 21, 2010 12:53 PM

Am I getting screwed out of overtime?

OK, so I work a 45 hour work week. I've been doing this for nearly 5 years now.

Originally I didn't think much of it, as part of my job was getting lunch for everyone, including my own, on the boss's tab. So I figured it wasn't overtime since I got a paid lunch hour.

But time has passed, I no longer have that responsibility, and more often I end up working past 6pm. Some nights I end up with a 12 hour work day.

However, I've never received a paycheck with a separate "Overtime" pay rate. I work in commercial trafficking, shipping TV spots around the country...nothing so special that I would think it'd be exempt from that or something.

So am I being screwed? I'm almost willing to believe my boss is simply not wanting to deal with the hassle of complicating the payroll process further, rather than outright trying to screw me out of money. If it's true, how should I go about fixing this? I work for a small, 7 person company, so there's no HR department or something to talk to about this.

I guess I should mention I work in Georgia, USA.

posted by toekneebullard to Work & Money (10 answers total)

Are you an exempt employee? Are you on salary?
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:55 PM on September 21, 2010

Response by poster: Nope, I get paid hourly.
posted by toekneebullard at 12:57 PM on September 21, 2010

Response by poster: Looking over the exempt employee stuff, I'm above the $23,660 minimum. However I don't make the $100,000 to be considered a "Highly Compensated" worker either.
posted by toekneebullard at 1:05 PM on September 21, 2010

So, to clarify, when you work a 45-hr week, you get paid for 45 hours? You just don't get time-and-a-half for the extra 5 hours?

The Federal Law that mandates overtime for certain employees is called the Fair Labor Standards Act. The Department of Labor has an extensive guide to the FLSA online. You might want to read over it and see if you fall into any of the exempt categories (executive, administrative, professional, computer, or sales). If you do not meet those requirements, then you are classified as non-exempt and should be getting overtime.
posted by donajo at 1:05 PM on September 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

The Georgia Department of Labor says:

Unless specifically exempted, employees must receive overtime pay for hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek at a rate of 1 and 1/2 their regular rates of pay. Some exemptions include white collar workers employed in executive, administrative, professional, and outside sales positions who are paid on a salary basis. For a more inclusive list of exemptions, click on the link below.

This is the "link below."
posted by rtha at 1:06 PM on September 21, 2010

Exempt and hourly are not mutually exclusive. Nothing against about.com, but the US Department of Labor (or that of Georgia) might be a better place to start researching the definition of an "exempt" employee.
posted by Doofus Magoo at 1:06 PM on September 21, 2010 [2 favorites]

There's actually a whole series of criteria that qualify employees as exempt- typically a professional exemption based on specialized qualification, and a management exemption based on managing 3 or more employees. Are you paid for each hour worked and are you reporting them on a regular basis? If you are paid for each hour worked, federal law requires you get paid time and a half for each hour worked over 40 in a given work week.
posted by Zophi at 1:07 PM on September 21, 2010

In addition to the question of whether or not you are exempt, you have to figure out whether the company is subject to the FLSA to begin with. If it has gross yearly sales under $500k, it probably isn't.
posted by Perplexity at 1:33 PM on September 21, 2010

Your state has a website that probably explains this. You can call the Attorney General's office with questions, but you'll get better help if you start with a better understanding of how this stuff works.
posted by theora55 at 2:07 PM on September 21, 2010

Wait, so you're getting paychecks that are explicitly written out as, say 44hours at $N/hour? It's not that you know you worked 44 hours but your checks say 40*$N (no acknowledgement of extra hours), and it's not that the checks say 40@$N plus 4@$N, (acknowledgement of those hours being in excess but no special rate).

It seems like the obvious thing to do would be to just ask your boss about it, not in a special important meeting kind of way, but at some convenient private moment. "Hey, I was wondering, why are our jobs exempt from overtime pay?" Then, you can either look it up and confirm that (s)he's right, or maybe you've started the ball rolling on "oh, I'm not exempt? So, we should fix this payroll problem, or I should stop working overtime."
posted by aimedwander at 8:16 AM on September 22, 2010