Understanding FLSA White Collar Exemptions

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) has strict rules about minimum wage, counting your work hours, getting paid for the hours that you work, and about when you get paid overtime. These laws are powerful, and workers can sue for significant damages if they aren’t paid as they are supposed to be. But the FLSA has one loophole…it doesn’t apply to all workers.

Some workers are exempt, which means that employers don’t need to pay those exempt employees fairly, or pay them overtime, or do anything else that the FLSA might require.

The White Collar Exemption

One of those exemptions is called a “white collar” exemption, which is an all encompassing term for a professional. You may actually be a professional, and thus, exempt from the FLSA, without even knowing it.

The Salary and Income Test

To be exempt from the FLSA in California, a worker must make more than $70,304 (that number does go up over time and change as it is based on the minimum wage of $16.90; the more the minimum wage is increased, the higher the salary exemption threshold will be).

The worker also must be salaried, meaning that they get paid the same thing every paycheck; their paycheck does not depend on hours worked or any objective marks of production.

If your employer docks your pay for a half day, or on a day no work was done or available, you are not salaried, and likely, not exempt (which again, is good for you as an employee, because being non exempt means your employer must pay you as the FLSA requires).

Job Duties Test

More than half of the workers’ time or job duties must involve discretion or the use of independent judgment, the way a supervisor or manager would do (note that under federal law, the employee must be “primarily engaged” in this kind of work, a much more employer-friendly standard).

That can’t be random independent duties or judgment; it has to be an essential part of half of the worker’s normal regular duties to be exempt. It doesn’t matter what your job description says that you do, or what your boss says what you do or how much independent discretion your boss says that you have, what matters is whether your actual regular job duties entail independent discretion or judgment.

In FLSA lawsuits where exemption is an issue, the employer, as a defense, must prove that the employee’s work duties entailed these kinds of activities on a regular basis.

What you may notice is that most of the jobs that fit within these exemptions, are often called executive, managerial, professional or administrative type jobs. And those are exactly the categories that are exempt from the FLSA, under the federal FLSA rules.

Does the FLSA protect you–and is your employer violating the FLSA? Contact the San Jose employment attorneys at the Costanzo Law Firm today.

Source:

shrm.org/topics-tools/employment-law-compliance/california-s-white-collar-exemption-requirements–compliance-tip