Employee Pay: On-Call Shifts and Reporting Time Pay
Putting employees on-call or requiring them to call in before shifts could raise employee pay issues. Businesses that experience fluctuations in foot traffic, calls, or demand, face the difficulty of predicting employee schedules. Since needs change quickly, it could be difficult to anticipate how many employees the business needs on any given day or part of the day. Many businesses choose to address this difficulty by scheduling employees for on-call shifts to ensure that there are workers on stand-by who are ready to step in on short notice if the need arises. Depending on your business’s particular rules and practices related to these on-call shifts, you may have employee pay violations if on-call employees are not paid “reporting time” pay. A California Court of Appeal in the case of Ward v. Tilly’s, Inc., addressed the question of what it means to “report to work” for purposes of determining whether the employee is owed “reporting time pay” under the wage order (Wage Order 7 that governs the mercantile industry in this case). In that case, Tilly’s scheduled its employees for a … Continue reading
Beware of Paying Employees a Fixed Daily Rate
The restaurant industry is often the target of wage and hour lawsuits, particularly, ethnic restaurants, which find themselves on the defense side of a wage claim or lawsuit filed by a server or cook who was recently terminated. For ease of administration, many smaller restaurant owners and their staff agree on wages in the form of a fixed daily rate that is paid regardless of the number of hours the employee works. Unfortunately, many of these restaurant owners believe that because there’s an agreement between them and the employee and because a close personal relationship that this type of arrangement is fine. However, this mistaken understanding will cost many hard-working small business owners tens of thousands of dollars if not ultimately force them to close down the business. Here is information that could keep you and your restaurant business out of trouble. Can I pay employees a flat daily rate instead of hourly? Technically, yes because neither federal nor California law requires that you pay employees on an hourly or any other basis. BUT paying employees a flat daily rate regardless … Continue reading