Wage and Hour Compliance: A DOL Update, and Ways to Avoid Overtime Liability Landmines

The current administration's leadership and initiatives at the Department of Labor (DOL) have had some time to gel, and new themes and nuances have emerged. Employers can avoid making inadvertent but expensive wage and hour compliance mistakes by attending this discussion of the following developments and more: Where are we with respect to new exemption regulations and other overtime-related regulations? What can we glean from recent Wage & Hour Opinion Letters? What course is the DOL on with respect to wage and hour issues, and is Congress primed to chime in? Have the courts been making it easier or harder for employers to combat overtime lawsuits? What are the most common mistakes employers make in exempting employees and in properly calculating hours worked and the regular rate of pay for overtime purposes? How can employers best avoid these compliance traps?

Learning Objectives:

• Learn about the latest trends in overtime pay enforcement from the DOL's perspective, the latest DOL compliance and regulatory initiatives, and wage and hour developments from Capitol Hill.
• See how your employer may be vulnerable to wage and hour litigation, and gain techniques to help avoid litigation, or to position the company to win if it’s confronted by litigation.
• Grasp the major problems employers face with respect to misclassifying employees as exempt from overtime pay, and discover techniques for analyzing jobs so that employees are properly classified as exempt versus non-exempt.
• Understand how employers become liable for miscounting time for overtime pay calculation purposes, so that they can avoid such practices in the workplace.
• Better appreciate the nuances involved in properly calculating the regular rate of pay while paying for overtime, and avoid the liability that employers too often innocently incur.