4.7 million workers across the United States worked remotely on a regular basis, even before the coronavirus pandemic. Many employees are attracted by the flexibility and freedom that working from home provides. Similarly, remote employment allows employers to save on overhead expenses and reap the benefit of higher employee work satisfaction. Now, as a result of the coronavirus, social distancing, and businesses protecting their workforce, the number of employees working remotely has spiked to all-time highs.
With the onset of the coronavirus, working remotely provides an opportunity for employees to be productive (and not miss a paycheck), but not potentially expose their colleagues while they may be contagious.
However, for employees, there is a downside to working remotely: the feeling that you are always working for – or available to – your employer 24/7/365. This becomes a problem (and a wage violation) when employers don’t track all the hours their remote employees work.
Overtime laws apply to remote workers the same exact way that they apply to on-site employees. Employers are legally required to accurately track the hours of their remote employees and pay them for all hours they work, including paying them at an overtime rate for hours worked over 40 in a week. However, although tracking work time for remote employees is a fairly easy thing to do, many employers don’t track remote employee work time, or they simply pay them for a set number of hours every week (usually 40). As a result, many remote employees working more than 40 hours a week are not paid for all of their work time and are not paid at an overtime rate when they work over 40 hours.
If you work remotely, be sure that your employer has developed a system to accurately track all hours worked, rather than simply paying a set amount of hours. As mentioned above, it is common when working from home that your workday exceeds your set Schedule and to thus work “off-the-clock” hours. To the extent your employer is not properly tracking remote hours worked, call the Shavitz Law Group today at (800) 616-4000 for a free consultation.
YOU EARNED IT, NOW LETS GO GET IT.
Gregg Shavitz, Shavitz Law Group, 951 Yamato Rd Ste 285, Boca Raton, FL and 800 3rd Ave, Suite 2800, New York, NY. Lawyers licensed in states including FL, NY, NJ, and TX. The choice of a lawyer is an important decision and should not be based on advertisements alone.
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