San Diego Wage and Hour Claims

Disputes over Wage and Hour Laws in San Diego

At Emge & Associates in San Diego, California, we believe that employees should be paid for all the hours they work. Both the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and California wage and hour laws make it illegal to not pay employees the money they have earned. Yet some employers will try to get away with not paying for overtime by altering time cards or requiring “off-the-clock” duties.

A common misconception of some San Diego-based employers is the idea that if an employee is paid a salary, the employee doesn’t get overtime compensation. This is often wrong. California wage and hour laws interpret a salary as a figure based on 40 hours per week and 8 hours per day. If you work more than either 40 hours per week or more than 8 hours per day, you may still be entitled to compensation above and beyond your salary, depending on your work duties.

The money you are owed might not seem like enough to justify a lawsuit, but your employer might have a pattern of disobeying the California Labor Code, Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) regulations, or other statutes. If so, your complaint could become an employee class action lawsuit that protects and compensates many other workers like you for violations of wage and hour laws. At Emge & Associates, we have heavy experience in class action litigation.

Some of the wage and hour laws issues that often lead to lawsuits are:

Unpaid Overtime disputes : These include leaving out hours worked, including required time before and after a shift. Also, they can claim “down time,” “off-the-clock,” or “rain delays.”

Meal and rest breaks: Employers in California must provide and document meal breaks of 30 minutes for each five hours of work, except that if the total work period is no more than six hours, a written waiver of the meal period can be agreed upon. For every meal break violation, the employer owes one additional hour of pay to the employee.

Commissions/Independent Contractor Status: Employees in the sales industry are sometimes denied a commission they earned due to a technicality created by the employer. Other times, employers try to claim that their employee is an independent contractor and not eligible for certain benefits.

You may simply not understand how your time at work is calculated, and just want your employer to give you a straight answer. Our attorneys can aggressively seek to make them come clean, and then we can decide whether they are in violation of federal and California wage and hour laws. Contact our lawyers today for a free consultation. To speed up the process, you can fill out our employment law intake form.