Overtime Pay

Frenchie

We had mandatory training on Saturday. Our Driver/Sales associates are 100% commission, so they do not receive any additional pay for attending the training. However, we had one Driver/Sales associate who was training all week, and so was being compensated on an hourly basis. I decided he should be paid for his time on Saturday at the overtime rate, since he had worked more than forty hours in the week. Did I screw up his exempt status by doing that?

Don D

Yes. But only if it were discovered in a DOL investigation. If you treat one exempt as non-exempt by tracking and paying his hours and do not do others in his job category the same way, you have jeapordized perhaps the status of the whole lot of them. A better approach may have been to pay all of them an extra bonus (not overtime) for the hours they spent doing something at which there was no opportunity for them to make commission. It would have been a win-win. That plus donuts and you'd have made a tremendous morale stride.

Frenchie

Don,
Thanks for the quick response. I was afraid that would be the case. I'd like to delve into this further. All of our Sales Delivery personnel are 100% commission and qualify under the outside sales exemption. When one of them changes a route, they generally spend one week training with the current sales person. During that week, we pay the person being trained an hourly rate for all hours worked. The current sales person gets the commissions. To avoid altering the exempt status, should we instead pay a training bonus, which could be calculated using the hourly rate and hours worked? We would prefer not paying double commissions for the period.

SMace

The way I read your post is that the training pay is his commission pay chopped up into an hourly rate. So in reality you are paying two commisions anyway.

Frenchie

No, we are paying the warehouse hourly rate. Under the collective bargaining agreement, when a Sales Delivery associate is off (ex. a personal day) they are paid the equivalent of 12 hours at the warehouse hourly rate. So, that is the rate we use in these training situations. By the way, this training is not covered in the cba.

Don D

I'm not at all sure about how you would or should pay a commission exempt position on vacation days.

It's just a guess, but I would think the DOL would want you to arrive at an average daily pay using the exempt positions' wages, not somebody in the warehouse under a cba. That seems to me to have absolutely no correlation.