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The best intentions in the world can be frustrated by employment law’s sheer complexity. According to one estimate, a large national business operation is potentially subject to more than four thousand employment and labor laws, none of which is notable for its clarity. The best-known anti-discrimination law is the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, but many states have their own anti-bias statutes. Multi-state employers must comply with state overtime and related laws that differ from the federal standards and each other; to cite an especially important example, the state of California allows workers to collect back overtime for four years, while federal standards allow only three.
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Complex by nature, employment law also constantly changes. Old statutes are amended and new ones passed, and all are subject to continual review and reinterpretation by judges. The regulations that follow from each of these statutes are themselves liable to be rewritten and reinterpreted over time. For example, the circa-1954 U.S. Department of Labor job classifications used to analyze overtime claims were recently revised, having been rendered outdated by the dozens of new kinds of jobs created in the last half-century.
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Unversed in employment law, managers can easily opt for workplace policies that, while legitimate in a narrow business sense, are dubious in broadly legal terms. The Federal Labor Standards Act (FLSA) sets the national minimum wage as well as overtime pay and overtime and work-break standards for large employers, and violations of those standards are a common cause of class actions. Piper Hoffman, an attorney with New York-based Outten & Golden LLP ( Advocates for Workplace Fairness “), explains that FLSA violations often result from the ways even conscientious companies offer incentives to supervisors on the ground. In many of the national corporations we brought action against for off-the-clock violations, we found that supervisors were compensated based in part on the profitability of their operations, ” she says. And one of the few ways that a supervisor can improve profitability is to shave wage costs. ” In Braun, et al. v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., a jury found that 187,000 current and former employees in Pennsylvania were forced to work through rest periods by store managers who had been promised bonuses for cutting costs.
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