Non-profit and Overtime

Paula

I have a client that has a question regarding their non-profit child care center. To date they do not have "exempt and non-exempt" classifications for their employees, nor have they ever paid these employees for overtime after 40 hours. Is there anything that says non-profit businesses do not have to pay OT after 40 hours??

sonny

Not that I am aware of. I worked for a private non profit for years and we absolutely paid OT.

Down_the_Middle

I think your client needs to become familiar with the Fair Labor Standards Act which requires them to pay overtime, etc..... While there are a few industries and certain occupations that are not eligible for overtime, child care centers are not part of that exclusion. Their non-profit status should have nothing to do with the issue of paying O/T to bona-fide employees. This is probably a small employer with a few employees and they struggle to provide affordable child care, but I would be very nervous about letting this go too long. Somebody needs to assess what FSLA or your state law says about overtime.

Gillian

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 08-30-01 AT 10:25AM (CST)[/font][p]I work for a non-profit private university. As your question is posed, your client is violating basic wage and hour regulations. Sometimes there are some exceptions under state regulations but I can't imagine any state having an exception in this basic area of regulation. My latest issue has been employees working as "volunteers". In Ca. where we are, there is a narrow exception in this area which would allow a Red Cross employee to volunteer to serve at a disaster on an unpaid basis (my interpretation of the exception). Our "volunteers" certainly didn't fit that so they are now working on the clock and at overtime rates when appropriate.

One more thing - I don't think that you will find anything, other than some legal opinion written by an attorney, maybe a court case somewhere, which states that a non-profit must pay overtime. I think that you will end up with the regulation, which speak for themselves, combined with the absence of any language that provides an exception for non-profits.

System

The employer is non-profit, but the employees work for profit. I think the FLSA applies to nonprofits as well as for-profits. And I bet almost every employee at the day care center is nonexempt. If they sue, they could win all the overtime pay they earned for the past two or three years.

James Sokolowski
Senior Editor
M. Lee Smith Publishers