I won't make this too painful - after all, it's Friday, and on top of that, the Final Rule on white-collar overtime exemptions under the Fair Labor Standards Act is due imminently. That will be painful enough.

This quiz concerns wage payment, which is normally governed by state law, not the FLSA. Wage payment laws generally require that employees receive "all wages when due," and the laws ...

No one is immune from wage-hour payouts. Not even a Human Resources consultant.

California HR consulting firm TriNet has reportedly agreed to pay approximately $1 million in overtime and liquidated damages to 267 employees. The payment is in settlement of a wage-hour investigation conducted by the San Francisco office of the U.S. Department of Labor.

According to the DOL ...

The final version of the U.S. Department of Labor rule on white-collar overtime exemptions was sent this week to the Office of Management and Budget, the last stage before issuance of the Rule. For our coverage of the proposed rule, issued last summer, please visit these links:

Proposed Overtime Rule Would More Than Double Salary Threshold for Exempt Employees

Will "Duties Test" Be ...

"The boss is a jerk. I dread coming to work every day. I'm treated unfairly. Everyone else gets better treatment than I do. My pay stinks, and my company's paid-time-off policy leaves much to be desired. I should sue!"

The Daily Mail had an article this week about "the moment [employees] started hating their jobs," based on a Reddit discussion thread entitled "What work ...

A federal judge in Indiana dismissed yesterday all that remained of a lawsuit filed by student athletes, alleging that they were "employees" and therefore entitled to the minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Don Prophete, Jim Goh, and Steve Moore of Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete, LLP, represented the NCAA and hundreds of the university defendants.

The suit was ...

This is scary.

You'd think a person with "Manager" in her job title who was making more than $89,000 a year would be exempt from the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Not necessarily.

A federal judge in Maine ruled that Bottomline Technologies, Inc., a financial processing services company, will have to face a jury trial on the wage-and-hour claims of Debra* Colello ...

The U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration of the Department of Transportation announced yesterday that it is reducing by half the minimum percentage of drivers who must be randomly tested for controlled substances.

The change will take effect January 1.

Currently, employers are required to test at least 50 percent of their average number of commercial motor vehicle ...

What effect are liberalized marijuana laws having on employer drug policies?

Maybe not as much as you'd think.

The Society for Human Resources Management just came out with a survey of employer marijuana policies in states that have legalized it in some degree. Here are some highlights from the SHRM study:

*Of 224 employers who have operations in jurisdictions that have legalized ...

To find out why there is so much wage-hour litigation, read my point-counterpoint interview with plaintiff's attorney Fran Rudich, published in the November 25 edition of Bloomberg BNA's FLSA Litigation Tracker.

(Reproduced with permission from FLSA Litigation Tracker, 2015 FLLTR 6 (Nov. 25, 2015). Copyright 2015 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033) <http://www.bna.com>)

Thanks ...

NOTE FROM ROBIN: Ellen Kearns is head of our Boston Office and co-chair of the firm's Wage-Hour Practice Group.

The new overtime white-collar exemption rule will be issued approximately July 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's fall 2015 regulatory agenda, which the Office of Management and Budget published just before Thanksgiving.

I had earlier reported that ...