My wife works from home as an hourly data processor in Louisiana. She is given what probably amounts to 10 hours worth of work every day and is expected to complete it in 8 hours. To accomplish this, she works through her 30-minute lunch break probably 80% of the time, and she logs out somewhere between 5:15 and 6:00 instead of 5:00 as scheduled.
Any requests for compensation are reprimanded as "unapproved overtime," though I don't think she's had any explicit denials. But the hostile responses make her hesitant to request or report it at all.
She seems to think that because she was not given prior approval to work over 8 hours per day, that she's "volunteering" her personal time in order to make her next day's work easier, but I disagree and think she's due full compensation, plus 1.5x for anything over 40.
FLSA seems to indicate that her after-hours work is due, but it's a little fuzzier on the lunch period. It sounds like she should be compensated for "any time during which [she] must work, even if [her] employer calls it a break." But she's not being explicitly asked to work overtime, so I'm not sure what to make of it.
Granted, if it were me, I would work the 8 hours and whatever didn't get done would go in the "fuck it" pile, but we don't see eye-to-eye on the situation. Despite the fact that her job is low-paying ($14/hour), objectively terrible, and she's treated like crap, she's terrified of losing it and having to find something new where she'll have to get up and get dressed to go to an office.
So, on to the questions:
- Does the lunchtime and after-hours work both count as unpaid overtime?
- What options does she have that don't risk her job?
tl;dr: My wife works through lunch and after hours almost every day, is she due compensation?
Submitted May 17, 2017 at 10:05AM by chewycrunch http://ift.tt/2rqjVKz
