Overtime Payment & Minimum Wage Claims Lawyers

Employee wages are usually the highest single expense of a business, county or city. It is therefore not surprising that employers look for ways to keep their wage costs low. There are many ways for employers to do this legally. Unfortunately, it is very common for employers to violate the Fair Labor Standards Act ("FLSA") in their efforts to keep costs down. Sometimes these violations are accidental. Other times they are intentional. Further, the fact that the FLSA is written in "legaleze" which is difficult for both employers and employees to understand, makes the law easy to violate. Employees also seldom know their rights under the law, which means that most times, violations of the overtime or minimum wage requirements of the FLSA go undetected and unremedied.

As the FLSA is a very complex statute, what follows is intended to be an overview of the law and its basic requirements. It is not meant as an exhaustive analysis of the statute nor as legal advice to any particular employer or employee. Whether a claim is successful under the FLSA depends largely on the highly specific facts of each employment relationship. For this reason, you need to contact experienced wage and hour lawyers like Billips & Benjamin LLP as soon as you think you may have a claim.

The FLSA was originally passed in 1938 during the depression, and is one of the few employment laws which actually favor the employee. Generally, the FLSA mandates that employees who are not exempt from the FLSA are paid at least minimum wage for every hour that they work and that they are paid 1.5 times their regular hourly rate of pay (overtime pay) when they work overtime, which is more than 40 hours per week. 29 U.S.C. §§ 206 and 207. The federal minimum wage is $6.55 effective July 24, 2008 and $7.25 effective July 24, 2009.