The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) defines overtime as any time spent working after eight hours a day or forty hours a week. For most people, that means working eight hours a day, five days a week, but employees in some industries have odd shifts and their employers need to take this into account when calculating overtime.
In industries that need to be open during weekends, such as retail and healthcare, employees often take turns working weekends, leaving them with odd weeks. It is the employers’ responsibility to accurately calculate how much time employees spend working in a given week and compensate them accordingly.
According to a recent wage and hour class action lawsuit against CVS Pharmacy, the employer allegedly failed to properly define its workweek. The lawsuit alleges this resulted in employees getting paid straight time for their sixth consecutive day of work, when they should have been paid the premium overtime compensation of one and one half times their normal hourly rate for the whole day. Continue reading ›