In this blog series, we look at a variety of activities and items and discuss whether an employer has an obligation to pay for them (or the time employees spend in them). In our first installment of this series, we looked at the compensability of time spent by employees in COVID-19 vaccination, testing, and screening activities. In our second installment, we considered commute and travel time in a post-pandemic world. Today, we’re looking at employee expenses—out-of-pocket costs employees incur in order to do the work they were hired to perform.
Fair Labor Standards Act
The FLSA does not require an employer to pay for or reimburse employee expenses, regardless of whether those expenses are necessary for the performance of the employee’s job duties or otherwise incurred for the benefit of the employer. That said, the FLSA requires covered employers to pay non-exempt (i.e., overtime-eligible) employees no less than the minimum hourly wage for all non-overtime hours actually worked in a workweek, and not less than one and one-half times the “regular rate at which [the employee] is employed” for each hour in excess of 40 in a workweek. U.S. Department of Labor rules state that employees must receive these wages “free and clear”—a requirement that can be undermined by the employee’s incurrence of certain job-related expenses, as the agency explains:
[I]f it is a requirement of the employer that the employee must provide tools of the trade which will be used in or are...
Washington, April 27 Prominent television hosts and journalists have pushed back against online claims that the White House ... Washington, April 27 Prominent television hosts and journalists have ...