Legal Question in Employment Law in Indiana

Overtime pay and Comp time

I currently work for a company as a salaried emplyee. I am not in any type of managment position or administrive position. Currently I recieve Comp time for any over time that I work. However, I get one day for one day of work, not on an hourly basis. What I would like to know is this legal for them to compensate me with comp time and if so what is the formula that they must use. If it is not legal for them to give me comp time, do they have to pay me 1.5 times my hourly rate. Please advise me of any light you can shed on this matter.


Asked on 5/10/99, 2:11 pm

1 Answer from Attorneys

Dymond Steven Steven H. Dymond P.C.

Re: Overtime pay and Comp time

While I offer no legal opinion, consider the following: under the Fair Labor Standards Act, (FLSA), some basics are, I assume you do not qualify as an exempt employee. This is critical to this commentary. Exempt is genrally professional (trained with a dgree), teachers, adminstrative assistants, and executive managerial (supervises two or more, gets 250 per week salry or more). As a general statemetn if you do creative, work or work which requires constant discretion and decision making, you may be exempt. If you are exempt, then the companys witihin its rights, and is actually being generous.

If you do not qualify as exempt, then they company is not complying with the FLSA. If so you are entitled to overtime at 1.5 times your regualr rate after forty hours of work. Unless you are a public employee, comp time does not cut it legally. this means that you must be paid for the time over forty, not given time off (unless it is in the same week (NOT the same pay period). Thus once you work over forty hours you are entitled by law to be paid for it. Secondly comp time shoud be at time and one half. thus if you worked forty eight hours in one week, you should receive 12 hours time off as you would receive twelve hours overtime pay). Please note that the FLSA is failry complex, and there are a variety of facts which may change my comments. One such is if there is an agreement between the employer and employee that the salary represents pay for a fifty hour workweek, then since you would have been paid for the first fifty hours straight time you would only be entitled to ten hours at half time). If this is a problem that you really want to make an issue over, be sure to make all demands in writing, to notify the Departmetn of Labor of the practice, and to make a papare trail so that if there is retaliation for your claims of overtime, you may show that your were fired because of the claims. This is really too complex to fully and adequately address here, Call you local Departmetn of Labor to get more information.

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Answered on 5/18/99, 2:48 pm


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