Legal Question in Business Law in California

Hello Sir,

My name is Isabelle and I'm from Modesto, Ca. I hope that you do not get upset that I contacted you, but I was hoping you could help me with a question. Currently the company I work for is involved in a law suit at the courthouse in the county of where I reside. The lawsuit has not gone to trial yet, and it should go to court 4/2016. I've been working at a surgeons office for the last 10 years. When I first started our office manager would only pay overtime, anything that was over the 80 hours in our 2 week pay period. I advised her that I didn't feel that was accurate and that it should be anything over 8 hours a day should be overtime. She just told me that's how we do it, and pretty much end of story. Well, my former co-worker is suing for unpaid overtime that was paid as straight time, and for a few other labor law violation issues. Our CEO, which is not one of the doctors spoke with us employees individually and advised us that we may potentially be contacted regarding a lawsuit. He told us that before they contact us, or before we consider joining the lawsuit to give them the chance to make it right, on not paying us the overtime for the last 4 years correctly. I believe he waited until the suit got filed at the courthouse thinking that now we will not be able to join. I am trying to get paid for what is owed to me and what I am rightfully entitled to. I went onto your hourly overtime pay calculator to try to figure out my unpaid overtime with the penalties and interest. I just want to make sure I am doing it correctly and ethically. The way I was thinking of presenting it to the company would be to add up all of my hours that were not paid to me as overtime for the last four years and divide it by the maximum amount of weeks, which is 208 weeks, then it calculated the interest and penalties owed to me, and then deduct all of the money that they paid us as straight time for all of those overtime hours. So, if I worked 42 hours of overtime in a 64 week time span and a few missed meals, out of those 42 hours 6 were paid as overtime and 36 were paid as straight time. Therefore, I would be owed 36 hours at time and a half, so I would deduct the straight time pay after I calculated what was owed/due to me as overtime. According to the calculator I would be owed $4115.00 for time that was not paid as overtime and then I subtracted $486.00 which is what I was paid for those 36 hours unpaid as overtime. Does this seem correct? If you can not answer or advise me on this matter, I understand and I hope I am not out of line for asking if I am entitled to calculate it this way.

Thank you for your time,

Isabelle

[email protected]


Asked on 1/20/16, 6:39 pm

1 Answer from Attorneys
Charles Perry Law Offices of Charles R. Perry

Hello Isabelle,

Your calculations should be refined a little bit, and proceed week by week as to the number of hours worked, instead of averaging over the 208 week period. The error, however, should be relatively small, as it would only affect the interest. You may have an approximation that is good enough here, but it is not possible to tell.

It is also not possible to tell if you hae properly calculated the number of overtime hours You are entitled to overtime if you work more than 8 hours in any given day, or more than 40 hours in any given week.

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Answered on 1/20/16, 11:12 pm


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