‘Wage & Hour’

Under recent OSHA guidelines, healthcare workers may be entitled to paid leave following exhaustion of PTO if one of the following applies: 1) the healthcare employee tested positive for Covid-19, 2) the healthcare employee’s doctor diagnoses suspected Covid-19, 3) the healthcare employee has a fever of 100.4°F or, 4) the healthcare employee experiences loss of taste and smell. Employers can require at-home work if possible and can require testing. Once the employee tests negative, the benefit ends. Long hauler Covid patients may also be eligible for extended pay. It should

The United States Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division recently found a local Tampa restaurant in violation of overtime laws and awarded the worker a combined $150,749.00 in damages.  Some of the workers were making less than $6 per hour which is well below the $8.05 minimum wage in Florida.  The Federal minimum wage is $7.25.   It was also discovered that a kitchen manager was being paid $230 per week and, according to Federal laws, should have been paid a minimum of $684 per week or at least $23,600

Before the Lilly Ledbetter Act you had to file a Charge of Discrimination within 300 days from the time the employer first decided to discriminate against you by paying you less that your male counterparts. The problem with this is most women do not realize they are being paid less. Lilly Ledbetter was paid 40% less than the lowest paid male counterpart and she only discovered this after being with the company for 19 years. She lost her fight but has made a difference for women since then. Under the

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently filed suit against the University of Miami for wage discrimination against a female professor.

According to the charge, the university paid the female professor less than a male professor who was doing similar work. The two both teach political science, were both promoted to full professor at the same time and receive similar reviews from faculty. The female professor complained to the University of Miami, but no pay changes were made. 

This wage discrimination is in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of

James M. Thompson was interviewed by ABC Action News for a news story regarding new Federal overtime rules for salary employees.

If you feel you are owed overtime wages please contact Thompson Legal Center at 813-769-3900.

James Moten Thompson and Kathryn Hopkinson successfully defended their client in a case where Plaintiff (represented by Cynthia Sass and Yvette Everhart) claimed that Defendants failed to pay her overtime compensation to which she claimed she was entitled under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”). Defendant disputed that Plaintiff worked more than forty hours in a work week and testified that Plaintiff never reported working overtime. The Court found that Plaintiff failed to prove that she worked over 40 hours in any given week. After a 5-day non-jury trial, the

James Moten Thompson was interviewed by Tampa Bay FOX 13 about Disney agreeing to pay $3.8 million in back wages to park workers to ensure compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act. The Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor found that Disney would deduct a uniform expense which caused some employees’ hourly rates to fall below minimum wage.  The investigation also revealed that Disney employees were not compensated for work performed before or after shifts.  The Department of Labor stated that, “employers cannot make deductions that take workers