California Overtime: Fact of Fiction?

The Myth of Salary

There are myths regarding California overtime that suggest employees that are compensated with a salary are not entitled to overtime. This myth comes from the requirement of certain California overtime exemptions that the employee be paid a salary. That requirement is just one of many — and it is the easiest to meet. The fact remains that there are many people who are paid a salary that are entitled to overtime, and there are many people who are paid hourly that don’t get any overtime. Suffice to say that if someone told you that you are not entitled to overtime just because you are paid a salary, that is just plain wrong.

If you are paid a salary, you are still entitled to overtime unless you meet all of the requirements for one of the California overtime exemptions. These added requirements are not easy to meet and many people simply do not meet them. If you have questions about whether your particular job would be entitled to overtime, you can contact a California labor law attorney to assist you in evaluating your claim.

The “Supervise Two People” Myth

Another California overtime myth is that if you supervise two or more people, you are exempt. This one has a little more factual basis than the one above, but is still far from accurate. One of the requirements for the Executive Exemption is that you must supervise at least 2 people. However, this requirement is only one of many. In addition, the law has regularly been interpreted to find that supervising only 2 people would rarely require sufficient supervisory time to satisfy the exemption since you must spend over one half of your time performing supervisory duties. As you can read in the Executive Exemption section, the exemption is very hard to meet and only true executives of the company will qualify for it.

If you are a “team lead”, “project manager”, or “development manager,” you can still be entitled to overtime. Of course, job titles do not control whether or not you are entitled to overtime, and your actual right to overtime will depend on what actually do for your job.

California also has history of requiring overtime for managers who spend more than 50% of their time doing the same work as their subordinates.

Comp Time Given For Overtime Hours Worked

A common practice for some employers is to give “comp time” in exchange for overtime hours worked. That is, if you work 48 hours one week, you can take a day off the next week. There are many problems with such a policy. An important one is that if you worked 48 hours in one week, then 8 hours would be paid at the overtime rate of 1.5x. Thus, you really have 12 hours of pay at the regular rate and giving you 8 hours as “comp time” shorts you 4 hours. In any case, California labor code 204.3 requires that employers are not allowed to use any “comp time” programs that take overtime from one week and give time off in another week.

If you have experienced any of these issues you should immediately seek counsel from an experience California labor law attorney.

You can call our team with any questions at: (619) 342-1242