Labor Hours/Commission/Minimum Wage

lbaird

I am looking for information on non-sales commission paid employees.

Situation: Service Technician (Mechanic) for a Car Dealership is paid by the Labor Hour which is determined by the Chilton Book. Each and every job is assigned certain billable time. This is what the customer is billed and determines how much time the tech will be paid for a particular job. The tech is paid $20.00 per labor hour (commission pay). The tech is only paid for the labor hours and does not receive an hourly rate for hours spent at the dealership. One day the employer decides that they are going to have all of the techs come in and clean on a Saturday and pays them $8.00 an hour.

Question(s): Are there any regulations on what work an employer can ask a commission paid employee to do and what they must pay that employee for doing that work?

allengeorge

In my opinion the service technicians are non exempt employees of the dealership. If the Saturday time is beyond the 40 hours of work then they should be paid overtime and the overtime is based on their normal pay and they should receive time and a half. If it is not overtime, I guess it should be their normal draw which may be higher or lower than $8.00 an hour.
Now, having said that, I am not sure whether I am right and in fact am looking for information about how car dealerships determine exempt vs non exempt employees. Just because they are commissioned doesn't make them exempt, does it?

lbaird

I too am looking for more information on this subject. I do not think this would make them exempt, but am unclear on how this is determined.

Don D

Certainly car mechanics are not exempt employees. I see no reason why the dealership cannot require them to perform cleanup duties on Saturday or any other time when they are not engaged in repairing autos.

lbaird

I could see that too if the dealership paid them an hourly rate for just being there, but they are only paid per Labor/Flag hour on the work they perform on automobiles, so in essence if they aren't working on a vehicle then they aren't making any money.

allengeorge

They are still employed and blue collar non exempt employees. There is so much we do not know about this situation such as what their agreement is with the dealership. But just suppose they agreed to be paid for only the time they work on a car. When they are not working on a car then I would suppose they are free to come and go as they please. If the owner wants them to work on a Saturday to clean up and they have not worked 40 hours then straight pay would prevail but I would imagine overtime comes into play if they have worked more than 40 hours and it would be based on wages plus commissions totaled per hour with time and a half applied. Interesting question but like a lot of things you have to know all the facts.

Shadowfax

What you have is a non exempt paid at a job rate (commission per job). When they work o/t it becomes necessary to compute their 'regular' rate. That is arrived at by adding all earinings received at job rate during the workweek and dividing by the total # of hours actually worked that week. I believe the reg permits half time pay in this case for all hours worked in excess of 40 (cfr 778.112). Keep in mind that the regular rate will fluctuate weekly, so it needs to be calculated each week to determine the o/t rate. Hope this helps.

pork1

In addition to the above, you should study Sections 785.14, .15, .16, & .17. These pertain to the definition and understanding of Waiting Time, On Duty, Off Duty, and on-call times. All of these understandings may be involved with the understanding of what the company can do when there is no automobile to be fixed, or a delay of one specialist mechanic waiting to begin work on a transmission after some other mechanic replaces the starter. It would appear to me that the mechanic may not be in full control of his/her time in between job orders, thus the employee is on the clock from time to time and working on jobs from time to time!

PORK