Overtime Federal Laws

Overtime is the hours spend at work of an employee that exceeds the standard working time for a day.

The federal law has provisions on how employers should compensate the overtime hours of an employee per week.

There would be times that your hours for work just seem to be insufficient for you to accomplish your work loads. Those times are characterized by piling deadlines, and mountains of paper works. The time that you would be spending with these tasks may already be taking up more than what you are required in your office. Usually, when you are in this state, you are said to be having overtime.

Overtime is defined as working hours that you spend in your office to complete different tasks or assignments delegated to you after your regular hours. It is basically the additional hours that you acquire more than the official working time set by the company parallel to corporate laws. Laws on overtime pay vary according to state or country. But for the federal law, overtime is only applicable to employees who are paid by the hour. This means that workers who have fixed rates per day are not affected by overtime because they are paid for the entire day already. Also, the employees covered by overtime are in the blue collared jobs, non-management works, hourly paid jobs, and minimum paid works. The executive jobs or the white collared jobs are not covered by overtime because they are already earning more than $455 per week. The said statuses are considered by the federal law. This means, employers are not the one to decide on which employee to exempt from overtime provisions. If they do so, they will be punishable according to the gravity of offense.

Normally, the required hours for an employee to stay at work in the office are ten hours. It doesn’t limit the employer to 8:00 to 5:00 shift only. This means that workers, regardless of their work shift, as long as they complete ten hours are considered by the law. But the standard working time may vary for every country. Ten hours is considered only as the common length of time a person has to serve at work per day. These hours must only include regular working days, which is Monday to Friday as considered by the federal law. Saturdays and Sundays are not included because generally, they are no work days. But there are companies that go by Monday to Saturday working days. Some even have staggered working days, which may be every other day, or just in any way as set by the company. What is important in their set-up is that they are paid for every day that they spend for work. As for holidays, they are not considered as overtime work days. If one is required to work on a holiday, overtime is not in effect, instead, they are given double pay.

There is no limit in the hours of overtime per week, regardless whether the overtime is mandatory or not. The computation of the overtime pay depends on the compensation of the employee’s work per hour, his total salary per day or per week, regular number of working hours per day or per week, and bonus if the employer is good enough to give his hard working employer on his overtime pay. The schedule of giving the overtime pay depends on the day that the company releases its payroll for the month. For example, it gives the payment every Wednesday; thus, it will also give its overtime pay on a Wednesday.

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