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Salaried/Exempt More than 40 hours a week!!!!

JohanaJohana 5 Posts
in Compensation Vote Up0Vote Down
Can we schedule salaried/exempt employees to work more than 40 hours a week without paying OT? My company business needs had change a little. We need the Managers (salaried/exempt) to work between 41-45 hours a week to cover the shifts.
Is this legal?

Please help!

Thanks
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  • santiresantire 48 Posts
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    [font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 03-29-02 AT 09:09AM (CST)[/font][p]Most important is that you never, ever pay overtime to an exempt employee. That is an absolute rule. I will not go into bonuses, monies that can be paid to exempt employees in excess of their salary but that is a much different matter. First, let's clarify the term salaried/exempt. Most exempt employees are salaried. A basic premise of being exempt is that a fixed salary is being paid regardless of the number of hours worked in a week whether one hour or eighty. Some exceptions exist as to a fixed salary for some exempt employees such as certain commissioned sales people and this is an extensive story in itself. However, you can also have a salaried/nonexempt status which creates a special situation for computing overtime. However, to the question of requiring salaried/exempt employees to work particular hours which happen to exceed 40 hours a week, the answer is yes. Must you pay them overtime? Definitely not and if you do you could thereby convert their status to nonexempt since treating an exempt employee as nonexempt can make them nonexempt. Can you specify what those hours will be? Again the answer is yes if those specific hours are the time that you need that employee to be present for the particular type of work. Where you must be careful is how you keep track of whether they are in fact working that number of hours according to the start and end time you specify. Do not keep hourly records for an exempt employee because the basic rule is that you are not supposed to be keeping track of the number of hours they work. You can, though, have them reflect that they are present. If they happen to not be working at the times you specify you cannot dock their pay for the missing hours. However, you can warn and discipline them in the same way as for other aspects of their work such as through evaluations and even termination.
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