Wage question

HRinGA

I've tried to muddle thru the FLSA site, but don't have the patience to dig any deeper.

I have a FT hourly employee who wants to deliver papers once a week. We typically pay that position a flat fee once a week to do this. The papers are mailed out, so he makes one stop at the post office and a few others at different rack locations. (no more than a couple hours work) Can we add the lump sum to payroll as "additional comp"? Am I violating some wage and hour law?
Thx

System

I'm not quite clear on what delivering papers has to do with his job and why you would pay him a flat fee separately for that particular task.Have you considered just combining his flat rate into his hourly rate and just pay him hourly for all his duties? It seems it would be a lot easier to just bump his pay a few nickels and not have two pay schemes to calculate. Maybe I'm just missing the point of your question.

Open1

I get this question constantly in my workplace in an effort to avoid time and a half and merely pay straight time. 8-|

IF you want to get into salaried nonexempt positions where OT is added to a fixed weekly rate as half time, do a search (for "salaried nonexempt") and you'll find some answers.

From someone with 60 +/-sal/nonex employees bi-weekly...believe me, it is WELL WORTH paying him the time and a half every other week!!! If you have a lot of employees doing this, the salaried nonexempt classification might save your company some money, but probably not more than your time to do payroll.

Some bosses here may hate me now... :-S

HRinGA

I think I found something that answers my question. I have a wage & hour law book (as it applies to newspapers) that explains it. For those of you who are interested, it basically calls it a "dual-function employee" and states the comp for the OT to be at least time & 1/2 of the statutory minimum rate. It also advises that the EE sign an agreement showing what he is paid at each job for regular and OT (in both jobs). Any hours in the 2nd job will be regarded as OT but If I understand this correctly, we can adjust what the regular rate would be for the 2nd function as long as it is above min wage.