No more overtime!
RuthG
117 Posts
Can we tell an hourly employee that they can not work overtime? Can we then not pay them for those hours if they work them without permission?
Comments
You can tell hourly employees that they may not work overtime. You can also discipline them if they do work overtime in spite of your direction. But this discipline may not take the form of not paying them. You must pay them for overtime worked, even if they have gone against your orders.
"Many companies require employees to seek approval before working overtime. Although that is an acceptable policy, employers sometimes go a step further and refuse to pay for unapproved overtime. Under the FLSA, however, an employer must pay for all hours "suffered or permitted" to work (i.e., any work that employees perform with the knowledge of their employer, whether or not they have been asked to do the work). Because the FLSA does not distinguish between approved and unapproved overtime, employers must generally pay time and one-half the regular rate for that work. Employers are allowed, however, to discipline or even terminate an employee for violating an overtime approval policy." from 5 Common Ways Employers Violate FLSA Laws.
The FLSA is actually designed to prevent employers from being able to create agreements to bypass it's provisions in order to ensure that employers do not use coercive tactics to do so. For example, you cannot enforce an agreement with a non-exempt employee to only receive straight time no matter how many hours worked. Generally speaking, anything you can think of to get out of the requirements of FLSA is almost certainly proscribed in the statute or the regs. This is definitely one of those cases.
FLSA places the burden of tracking work time on the employer. If an employee claims to have worked overtime, you better have plenty of cooperative and disinterested witnesses as well as the time and energy to document everything before you modify their time card to say otherwise because the cost of defending a complaint will by far exceed what you'll end up having paid. If the disputed OT wasn't approved, discipline accordingly, but you will generally want to pay it if you can't beat it. In an undisputed situation, pay the OT and discipline accordingly.
If you don't have a policy stipulating that OT must be approved in advance (in writing), then get one in place. :-)