Courtesy of Pat DiDomenico at Business Management Daily

Last month’s news that AT&T is facing a $1 billion (with a B!) class-action lawsuit over wage-and-hour mistakes put a jolt into U.S. employers of all sizes. That came on the heels of word that the U.S. Department of Labor dramatically beefed up its enforcement division. If this doesn’t scare you, it should.

A BusinessWeek report says Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) lawsuits have “exploded nationwide,” and that “because wage-and-hour laws have been so widely violated, undetonated land mines remain buried in countless companies.”

Which pay-related mistakes are you making?

  • Employees wrongly classified as exempt from overtime?
  • Hourly employees paid incorrectly (or not at all) for their travel time?
  • Failing to retain payroll records for the right amount of time (3 years, right?)?
  • You closed the shop when the blizzard hit – do you have to pay the staff?
  • Violating – or being unaware of – the “rounding law”?

All it takes is one employee filing one complaint to get the class-action snowball rolling downhill. Wal-Mart paid $640 million; IBM coughed up $65 million; Siebel forked over $27 million. Amazon is facing a huge lawsuit for allegedly violating the rounding law.
 

 Something to think about….