What is a fluctuating working week?

The fluctuating working week is a definition for wage laws and hours defined by the US Labor Ministry (Dol). Although the principle of a fluctuating working week was designed to protect employees from paying lower than normal wages when the Act on fair work standards in the US (FLSA) was made by law in 1939, since 2011, changes in the fluctuating working week defined to more convenient employers. This allows employers to avoid paying excessive payments to employees by structuring its salary as a salary instead of an hourly wage. Since 2011, the law has also been updated to prohibit employers to pay bonuses and other wage types to the employees hired within the fluctuating working week model that reversed the 2008 decision in a law that enabled these types of additional payments to be carried out. Companies that consider the use of this practice,It is recommended to earn legal instructions before, as several points in the law can lead to the area of ​​conflict between the employee and the employer in such cases. The primary rules to be taken into account include the fact that the actual amount of hours working during each week must actually fluctuate, and employees must pay salary instead of an hourly wage.

One of the weaknesses of the fluctuating working week for employers is that the employee's lessons must be carefully checked in order to prevent violations of the minimum wage laws. The employee under the plan is paid by a fixed wage regardless of hours worked in a week. If an employee works 40 hours a week and is paid $ 400 (USD), it is $ 10 per hour. However, if the employee should work 60 hours after the Watching Week and the same salary of $ 400 will be paid, his hourly wage would be afterUze $ 6.66 per hour, which could break the minimum wage laws. Although the employee would be paid for another 50% of his overtime wages for 20 hours of extra work, a fluctuating working week model would still violate labor law if the minimum wage was set at $ 7 per hour.

The fluctuating working week may not be documented in writing when an employee is hired, so this can also lead to conflict if wages change from week to week when they are divided into an hourly base. Professions in which it is most often confusing may be those where the clock usually fluctuates a lot, for example in emergency medical and fire service or with seasonal workers who are in great demand when the climate is good and less demand when it is bad. The reason why an employee may feel cheated in such circumstances is that overtime wages can be considerable when working weeks are long and is completely missing when it is not, which is that the total hourly rate DOSThey are messed up significantly.

One of the principles of the FLSA model was to encourage employers to hire more employees using a fluctuating working week to save money on overtime when employees did not need so much. Since 2011, however, the opposite has become a rule where employers used a model to hire fewer employees. This is because it is more cost -effective to pay several overtime employees and give them excessive hours during busy seasons than to undergo expenses on the account that comes with hiring new employees. The benefits that are commonly offered commonly offered often exceed their basic reward for value, including health insurance and holiday costs. Other costs for employers are discouraged from hiring new people, such as increased administrative obligations and paid unemployment benefit insurance, so the fluctuating working week has been used as a way of minimizing new hiring since 2011.