Thanks to all who joined us for our first of three webinars on global labor compliance. With the help of our guest speaker, Brian Dixon of Littler Mendelson, we had a great session followed by lots of insightful questions and answers!

In this discussion, we walked through the upcoming changes and challenges facing U.S. labor law compliance, and some best practices to combat any complications. Here is a recap with our key takeaways and top questions. If you want more details, you can click here to watch the recording of the full presentation.

Key Takeaways:

• Most organizations across countries and industries lack a globally unified system of time, due to the automation of countries with more employees, while relegating the medium and smaller locations to local vendors, excel, spreadsheets, or manual solutions.
• Why struggle with manual workflows? Because they don’t believe a single system exists that can handle everything needed to function across different industries and locations.
• These disparate systems contribute to the difficulty many companies face with legislative compliance, and when accounting for Union Rules or Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBA).
• Pay your employees to the minute. Starbucks had to learn this the hard way. There’s no accuracy like total accuracy, and paying employees for the exact minutes they work will help to achieve that.
• Most best practices are fairly straightforward: if you’re concerned that employees must walk a few minutes to their work area after punching, or tend to grab a coffee first, simply place more time clocks closer to each work area. The more accessible a workspace is, the more accurate the hours.
• With respect to best practices, rounding time can be tricky; but the safest options are to round to the nearest tenth of an hour, and then for the total hours worked that day. Be sure to remain consistent with the federal labor law requiring employees and employers to share equal benefit and burden when rounding.
• For some easy ways to remediate primary liability: do a regular rate audit, make sure employees are classified correctly, and create an internal audit procedure.
• Use a timekeeping system that can provide the flexibility and precision to track time accurately.

Top 3 Questions:

Q: If the corporate office is in New York, and there are employees working remotely in other states, what state’s meal and rest period rules apply? The corporate office or the state in which the employee works?

A: It would be the state in which the employees work. If a company has someone stably positioned in Connecticut, for example, and working remotely for an office in New York, the Connecticut rules would apply.

Q: We have to resort to manual calculations because of our unionized environment. Does Replicon’s solution support this requirement?

A: The answer here is a resounding yes. Replicon’s rules engine, the core of the Time Intelligence® platform, is configured by integrating bargaining agreements into the solution, so when time is captured it can interpret which specific pay rules should be used. With pay rates built-in to our Time Intelligence® platform, we can send you or your payroll provider a statutorily compliant payroll file that’s already been evaluated for the proper pay rules per the union negotiations.

Q: For workers residing in another state and traveling frequently back and forth to company headquarters, (in a different state) at about a 60/40 split: Which state’s rules apply, and do the changes during the time you’re staying in each state apply?

A: Great question. The only really safe thing to do in this circumstance is to apply whichever of the two state’s rules provide a better result for the employee. Multi-state employee travel issues are coming to the fore; despite coming up only occasionally because it’s not usually large groups of employees that travel. As a result we don’t see any class action litigation around it. Just make sure to apply whatever state rules are more favorable to the employee. Consider your travel times so employees aren’t traveling across work weeks. If you want non-exempt employees attending a meeting, traveling across one work week ensures you can use only one set of rules – as the fundamental compliance foundation for wage and hour is the work week.

Check out the informative session:

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The information contained herein should not be considered official legal advice. Please contact your legal counsel for specific labor law and employment law advice.