Atlanta Employment Attorneys BlogThe Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) is one of the key protections for American workers. It sets a price‑floor by means of the minimum wage, and it reduces the hours that Americans are required to work by requiring overtime pay for hours above forty per week. However, when the law was drafted in the 1930s, Congress realized that certain jobs either required extremely long hours or were traditionally compensated in unique ways. For example, sailors generally are on-call or working 24 hours a day when they are at sea, and Congress decided that requiring overtime pay for these employees would threaten an important part of the American economy. For different reasons, Congress exempted “outside” salespeople from the FLSA because such employees spend a lot of time travelling and they are generally paid on a commission basis. According to Congress, it didn’t make sense to require that these employees be paid overtime. Alongside these examples, the drafters of the FLSA included various other exemptions that made sense from an economic standpoint.
Articles Posted in Minimum Wage
“Employees” and “Independent Contractors” Under the FLSA
The FLSA is a broadly remedial statute that was designed with the dual goals of raising wages for the economically vulnerable while at the same time increasing employment. To accomplish these goals, the FLSA renders illegal any employment contract involving wages that are lower than the minimum wage or for wages that do not include overtime payments for hours worked above forty per week. As a result, some employers are tempted to work around the FLSA by maintaining that their workers are actually “independent contractors.” While it is true that the FLSA does not apply to bona fide independent contractors, most employers who attempt the “independent contractor” strategy do so at their own peril. This is so because the concept of “employment” under the FLSA is astonishingly broad, and a worker could be an “employee” under the FLSA who would be considered an “independent contractor” under the common law or other federal statutes.