A Dirty Secret Regarding Overtime Pay
Companies frequently “misclassify” employees by giving them inappropriate titles, paying them a salary and depriving them of overtime pay. It is a dirty secret. Just give an employee a nice title and pay them a salary and they will never know about all the overtime pay they are missing. People often think that overtime pay is only for people who are paid by hour or for lower ranking employees. This is not true.
The overtime laws do not care about titles or rank or if you are paid by a salary. Your right to overtime pay is based entirely on the work you do – labels and method of pay are not important.
A good example of the label game is the so called “manager” or “assistant manager.” Someone who is truly a manager is not entitled to overtime pay. But you are not a manager unless you spend at 50% of your time actually managing other people. Many managers only spend a small fraction of their time managing and instead spend most of their time doing other work. A large retail chain was recently caught misclassifying its managers. It had to pay millions in overtime to their store managers because the managers only spent 20-30% of their time managing and spent the other 70% of their time stocking shelves, sweeping floors and doing other retail work.
Another good example of the label game is a company that had a staff of “engineers.” None these “engineers” had engineering degrees and none of them had even graduated from college. Rather, these engineers did technical work and design on pumps and other mechanical products. The company did not pay its engineers overtime pay because they were misclassified as professional employees. Certain professionals such as lawyers, doctors, highly trained or educated scientists or the like are exempt from overtime. But these so called '”engineers” were not exempt because they were not highly educated or trained and therefore they had the right to overtime pay.
