Re: Piece Work
Since I posted this question on behalf of another member, I feel free to offer my own 3 cents worth (time and a half
).
DISCLAIMER
I am not a lawyer, and I am not offering legal advice. What follows is what I have learned from past employment experiences. I may be completely wrong, in what I am about to say. If you think that your employer has treated you unfairly, you need to find yourself a lawyer.
I am unfamiliar with the notion of piece work myself, as it pertains to the worker. I can easily see an electrical contracting company getting a contract that is based on a price per unit installed. But that is different from the same company paying its workers on the basis of dollars per unit installed.
I have been involved in setting company policies for wages, salaries, bonuses, and other compensation. What little I can offer (to the member who asked this question or to anyone else with a similar interest) is to ask back a rhetorical question of my own: Are you or are you not an employee of the company?
If you are not an "employee," then you are some manner of contractor to the company. That is sensitive territory. The IRS takes an interest in companies that claim to be paying "sub-contractors" who are really employees. I gather that a company can pay less money (lower taxes) to the IRS in a sub-contractor relationship than in an employer-employee relationship. So they have a set of (I think) very clear and simple "tests" to determine if the sub-contractor should really be treated as an employee of the company. I'll not offer any advice, nor even give a link to those IRS rules, but they should be easy enough to find.
If you are an employee, then you must necessarily be paid on either a salary or a wage basis. Those are the "conversational English" terms. The legal terms (as mentioned in the article you can read from the link in the original post) are "exempt" and "non-exempt."
A "salaried" worker is exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). A salaried person is paid the same, regardless of the number of hours worked. If you work 40 hours or 80 hours in a week, the company still only has to pay you the agreed salary. But there is a "catch." Some years back, I read about some engineering companies that were severely caught by that "catch." If you work only 36 hours in one week, the company still has to pay you the same salary. If you choose to take the other 4 hours as vacation time, or if you take it as sick time, the company will probably not be concerned. But if you don't use vacation or sick time, the company does not have the option of docking your salary for the "missing" four hours. If they are not happy about you taking time away from work, they can consider firing you. But they still have to pay you the agreed salary for that week.
The "catch" that caught the engineering companies several years back was that they did dock the pay of several junior engineers for time taken away from work, when the engineers did not have any remaining vacation or sick time. It was brought to court. The court decreed that those companies could not call those specific engineers "exempt," because they were not being paid on a salary basis. As a result, those persons,
and every other person in the company at the same or lower job level, had to get back-pay at time and a half for all the overtime they had ever recorded while employed at that company.
Finally, if a person is paid on a wage basis, that person is not exempt from FLSA. If you work less than 40 hours, you get paid for less than 40 hours. If you work overtime, you get paid at time and a half for the hours over 40. The "time and a half" is not open to negotiations. If it takes you 50 hours to complete a job that your boss thought should have only taken you 40, then the boss has to pay you for 55 hours. He can then fire you for being inefficient. But he can't just pay you for the 40 hours he thought the job should take.
One more tidbit: If the company wants to offer compensatory time off, in lieu of overtime pay, that may be allowable. But the number of hours they give you as compensatory time off must be based on time and a half. You work 10 extra hours this week, they give you 15 hours off next week. Here again, the "time and a half" is not open to negotiations.
