Every day that I went to work was another trip to the land of misery. Don’t get me wrong, I liked what I did and was very good at it. The problem was the constant abuse and demeaning attitude of my supervisor and the business owner. As a manager, I was also asked to come in and out of work every day. I had to be there at 7 in the morning and couldn’t leave the building until after 5 in the afternoon, this also included Saturdays. So I worked a total of more than 60 hours a week and did not get overtime. This had to be workplace harassment, if not workplace abuse. Through many investigations, I found out that they were violating the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act) and not necessarily harassment in the workplace, so I filed a lawsuit against the FLSA and won thousands of dollars.
First let me dispel one myth and that is that if you are a salaried employee, you are not eligible for overtime pay. This is not true! There are certain standards set out in the FLSA that must be fully met in order to classify you as exempt from collecting overtime wages. This means that if one of the conditions of each of the classified exemption statutes is not met, then you are entitled to overtime pay.
The three main exemptions are:
Administrative exemption
Executive exemption
Professional exemption
Everyone has their own particular set of criteria and it is beyond the scope of this article to address each and every point to see if you qualify for overtime. To find out what they are, just do a search for FLSA exemptions and see if it applies to you.
One thing is for sure, if you are a salaried employee, you may be entitled to collect overtime compensation. What I found interesting is that my own HR department had no idea and just assumed that I was exempt because I was a manager and they paid me a salary. This just tells me that this is happening all over the country and that there are literally thousands upon thousands of people who do not receive compensation for their overtime work.
If you must determine that you are not exempt and file a lawsuit, you are protected from further harassment and abuse by your employer. The law does not allow them to fire you because you filed a case against them, and if it can be proven that you were fired because of the lawsuit, they will be liable for additional damages.
They are also not allowed to give you a bad recommendation based on the outcome of the lawsuit. What that means is that if you go and find another job and your potential new employer calls them to ask about you, they have to give an honest assessment based on your skills as an employee. If you discover that you were given a bad recommendation that is totally unjustified and based on the claim, you will be liable in a court of law for additional damages. Trust me, once they give the process a try, they won’t do anything that causes them to have to go through that process again.
The sword, however, cuts both ways. There will be certain restrictions on your part, which if not followed will make you responsible for monetary compensation to your employer. It is called disclosure or more accurately nondisclosure. Most likely, they will ask you not to tell anyone about the results of the lawsuit. This protects them from telling other employees about the case and from filing multiple lawsuits against you. What you can do at the beginning of the case is bring in other employees who are in the same boat as you. This gives your case substance and more firepower and is more likely to be resolved out of court. The employer will want to settle out of court because if they go to court and lose, they will be liable to pay double the amount of overtime determined that they were negligent in paying.
The FLSA was written to protect the worker. It is most commonly seen in large “class action lawsuits” against a large company. It is not common for a person to win an FLSA case because most people simply are not educated enough and do not know what to do. There are also money considerations when litigating the case, but what I did was calculate a higher, percentage-based fee so that I didn’t have out-of-pocket expenses while litigating the case.
I didn’t know anything about the FLSA and had no idea that it affected me until I did my research. I learned about harassment in the workplace and the many ways that employees are mistreated on a daily basis. This is what gave me the firepower I needed to collect many thousands of dollars in late payments that cheated me. Find out if you are eligible by doing your homework and don’t trust your HR person to tell you the truth. They do not have in mind what is best for you. They work for their employer and answer to their employer.
Yes, a salaried employee can receive overtime pay if they are classified as non-exempt!
