As part of the U.S. Department of Labor’s opinion letter program, the Department’s Wage and Hour Division recently issued four opinion letters aimed at bringing clarity, uniformity, and transparency to the application of federal labor standards.
These four opinion letters, addressing the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), represent the Department’s official written interpretations of how these statutes apply in real-world workplace settings. While not binding on courts, the letters provide persuasive guidance regarding the agency’s position on enforcement of these statutes.
The first letter, FLSA2025-03, examined Section 3(m) of the FLSA, which authorizes an employer to apply a tip credit toward its minimum wage obligations for tipped employees and to require employees’ participation in a tip pool, so long as the pool is limited to employees who “customarily and regularly receive tips.” The question before the Department: whether a seafood restaurant could include “front-of-house” oyster shuckers in the restaurant’s tip pool with its servers. Answering in the affirmative, the Department explained that although the oyster shuckers do not receive tips directly from customers, they may still be considered employees who customarily and regularly receive tips because they have sufficient interactions with customers (e.g., they share and detail oyster offerings to customers, make recommendations, and field questions about different...
What You Need to Know The motion comes as class action attorneys are grappling with the advent of third parties that, through the use of technology, have advertised their services to assist poten...