Getting paid correctly for working on holidays

Q:        I worked on Thanksgiving Day and the Day after Thanksgiving. Am I entitled to holiday pay?         


A:        Around this time of year, we get this question a lot. So we thought we would revisit this issue, especially since Christmas Day and New Year’s Day are coming up and they fall in the middle of what many people would consider a workweek.

Hours worked on holidays are treated like hours worked on any other day of the week. The law does not require payment of overtime or other special premiums for work during holidays, unless such work goes beyond 8 hours per workday or 40 hours per workweek. The law also does not require that employers pay employees for holidays that are not worked.

The employer chooses when to be open and closed for business. They are not required to close their businesses or give employees the day off on any holiday.  If the employer is open on a holiday and schedules the employee to work that day, the law does not oblige the employer to pay the employee anything but the employee’s regular pay.

However, if by working on a holiday the employee incurs overtime hours, then the employee should be paid the overtime premium for all overtime hours worked.

The employer may pay a premium rate for working on a holiday if the employer adopts such a policy or practice. If the employee is subject to a collective bargaining agreement or an employment contract that provides for premium pay for hours worked on holidays, then the employer must pay a premium rate for working on a holiday.

Some employers choose to close their business on major holidays and give their employees paid time off equivalent to 8 hours of work at the employee’s regular rate. Many employees are subject to a collective bargaining agreement or an employment contract which provides that the business be closed on holidays and employees be paid time off from work.

Employees are smart to be vigilant about their rights to correct wages. Aside from inquiring into whether they are correctly paid for working on holidays, employees should also ask whether they are in fact paid for all the hours they have worked. Are they paid correctly for any of the following?

1) off-the-clock work

2) missed meal or rest breaks

3) work-related travel time

4) preliminary or postliminary work (such as time spent putting on uniforms or washing tools)

5) work done “at home”

6) controlled on-call or standby time

7) not being provided at least 5 hours of uninterrupted sleep while on a 24-hour duty

If an employee has issues regarding any of the above, the employee may be entitled to additional back pay.

Whether you’re working during the Holidays or not, we wish all employees and their families Happy Holidays! May you continue to enjoy good health and fairness in the workplace!

source: usa.inquirer.net

Finland to pay unemployed €560 (P29,145) per month

HELSINKI, Finland — Finland has become the first country in Europe to pay its unemployed citizens a basic monthly income, amounting to 560 euros (P29,145), in a unique social experiment which is hoped to cut government red tape, reduce poverty and boost employment.

Olli Kangas from the Finnish government agency KELA, which is responsible for the country’s social benefits, said Monday that the two-year trial with the 2,000 randomly picked citizens who receive unemployment benefits kicked off Jan. 1.

Those chosen will receive 560 euros every month, with no reporting requirements on how they spend it. The amount will be deducted from any benefits they already receive.

The average private sector income in Finland is 3,500 euros per month, according to official data.

Kangas said the scheme’s idea is to abolish the “disincentive problem” among the unemployed.

The trial aims to discourage people’s fears “of losing out something”, he said, adding that the selected persons would continue to receive the 560 euros even after receiving a job.

A jobless person may currently refuse a low-income or short-term job in the fear of having his financial benefits reduced drastically under Finland’s generous but complex social security system.

“It’s highly interesting to see how it makes people behave,” Kangas said.  “Will this lead them to boldly experiment with different kinds of jobs? Or, as some critics claim, make them lazier with the knowledge of getting a basic income without doing anything?”

The unemployment rate of Finland, a nation of 5.5 million, stood at 8.1 percent in November with some 213,000 people without a job — unchanged from the previous year.

The scheme is part of the measures by the center-right government of Prime Minister Juha Sipila to tackle Finland’s joblessness problem.

Kangas said the basic income experiment may be expanded later to other low-income groups such as freelancers, small-scale entrepreneurs and part-time workers. CBB

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Trump threats may not stop US offshoring of jobs

President-elect Donald Trump’s threats to retaliate against US companies planning to shift operations overseas constitute a new risk for multinationals, but may not sway those already planning to offshore jobs.

Trump laid down the gauntlet on Thursday at a campaign-style rally after striking a deal with Carrier to keep about 1,100 jobs in Indiana in exchange for $7 million in state tax incentives over 10 years.

“Companies are not going to leave the United States any more without consequences. Not going to happen,” Trump told the cheering crowd.

“They can leave from state to state, and negotiate deals with different states, but leaving the country will be very, very difficult.”

The president-elect did not offer details on how he planned to pressure companies to keep jobs in the United States, but one obvious lever includes the removal of government contracts.

That could make companies that work in defense, public works and public services especially vulnerable to retribution.

“Boeing, for example, would have to play ball if it wants its government contracts renewed,” said one expert who requested anonymity.

Trump coupled the threat with a promise to make the US a better place for business by cutting taxes and streamlining regulations.

“There are a lot of plans already in place,” said Hal Sirkin, a manufacturing expert at the Boston Consulting Group.

“CEOs are following the news closely and trying to figure out what all of this could mean for their businesses.”

Will threats work?

Some companies said Trump’s broadside was not sufficient to compel a change in plans.

Caterpillar announced in March 2015 it plans to shutter a plant in Joliet, Illinois that makes oil pumps and valves, and move 230 jobs to Mexico.

“We are continuing to execute on the previously announced plan on the stated timeline,” said Matt Lavoie, a spokesman at Caterpillar.

Food giant Mondelez International also signaled it would proceed with plans to relocate hundreds of jobs from an Oreo cookie plant in Chicago to Mexico.

“We have not had any contact with the new administration,” said Mondelez spokeswoman Laurie Guzzinati, adding that the Chicago baker remains an “important part of our manufacturing network” and that it continues to make Oreos at three US factories.

Not far from Trump’s victory celebration at Carrier in Indiana, the industrial companies Rexnord, CTS Corp. and Manitowoc Foodservice all plan to shift activities overseas from the Indianapolis area.

Manitowoc opted to close a plant in Sellersburg, Indiana due to a decline in demand for soda-drink dispensers, which had been made there, a spokesman said. Most of the 87 jobs are being moved to Tijuana, Mexico.

“The wind down of the plant is proceeding according to our original schedule,” Manitowoc spokesman Rich Sheffer said. “Yesterday’s speech did not include anything specific enough for us to reconsider our plans.”

Trump’s plans drew mixed reviews, with United Auto Workers Union President Dennis Williams offering accolades.

“We should use this opportunity to start running a commercial: If it’s not built in America, don’t buy it,” Williams said.

But the Alliance for American Manufacturing, an industry-labor alliance, offered tempered praise. It noted that Friday’s jobs report showed a decline of 4,000 manufacturing jobs in November and called for a crackdown on “unsavory” policies of trade partners.

“While on balance, I believe this week’s Carrier deal was worth doing, it isn’t a practical job creation policy moving forward,” alliance president Scott Paul said.

Senator Bernie Saunders said Trump’s plans were a losing proposal, in part because Carrier will still transfer 1,000 jobs to Mexico. Trump failed to save all 2,100 jobs, as he promised, Saunders said.

Carrier “took Trump hostage and won,” Sanders said in an op-ed he wrote for The Washington Post.

Trump “endangered” other US jobs, Sanders said, “because he has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives.”

source: business.inquirer.net

California HR firm to pay $1M in back wages to 267 workers

SAN FRANCISCO – A San Leandro, California-based human resources outsource provider will pay $1 million in back overtime wages and damages to hundreds of employees after a U.S. Department of Labor investigation that found widespread Fair Labor Standards Act violations.

The department’s Wage and Hour Division cited TriNet Human Resources Corp. for failing to pay time-and-a-half to 267 employees who worked more than 40 hours per week. As a result, the company will pay back pay wages and damages to workers in amounts ranging from a few hundred dollars to more than $13,000 for one worker. The division also assessed $58,000 in civil penalties for the violations.

In 2012, the company paid $326,000 in back wages and damages after the division found similar violations.

“TriNet falsely believed that raising an employee’s salary exempted them from receiving overtime pay,” said Susana Blanco, the division’s Wage and Hour director in San Francisco. “Hopefully, the company will now pay better attention to the rules going forward and pay its employees the wages they earned.”

TriNet provides human resources outsource solutions to small and midsize businesses. It offers payroll processing, human capital consulting, employment law compliance and employee benefits, including health insurance, retirement plans and workers compensation insurance.

Enforced by the division, the FLSA requires that covered, nonexempt workers be paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour for all hours worked, plus one and one-half times their regular wages for hours worked beyond 40 per week. Employers also must maintain accurate time and payroll records.  Employers are prohibited from retaliating against workers who exercise their rights under the law.

For more information about federal wage laws administered by the division, call the agency’s toll-free helpline at 866-4US-WAGE (487-9243). Wage and Hour’s services are free and confidential. Information also is available at http://www.dol.gov/whd.

source: globalnation.inquirer.net

Watch out! Google may be secretly recruiting you

Google’s apparently always on the lookout for new recruits, even when and where you least expect them.

According to Max Rosett, writing for The Hustle, he was Googling programming terms—”python lambda function list comprehension” if you’re curious—when suddenly the results page folded back to show a question.

Deciding that it wasn’t some sort of virus and ignoring that the question (and possible answers) seemed like something out of The Matrix or Saw, Rosett decided to go for it and clicked, “I want to play.”

He ended up on a page called “foo.bar.” where he started solving programming challenges. After the sixth one, Rosett had the option to submit his contact information. Long story short, Rosett ended up spending a day at the Google headquarters for a more formal interview which led to a job offer.

If you access foo.bar for the first time, you’ll encounter a log-in page. Your Google account won’t work if you try to access it—the page will just tell you, “To log in, you have to have logged in before,” which means that you need to have gotten there via Googling something.

“Foo.bar is a brilliant recruiting tactic. Google used it to identify me before I had even applied anywhere else, and they made me feel important while doing so,” Rosett said. “At the same time, they respected my privacy and didn’t reach out to me without explicitly requesting my information.” — Bea Montenegro/TJD, GMA News

source: gmanetwork.com

Demanding, low-control jobs linked to type 2 diabetes

NEW YORK – Even without classic risk factors for type 2 diabetes, people with high-stress, low-control jobs were over 60 percent more likely to develop the disease than unstressed workers in a new German study.

The findings add to substantial evidence that job strain represents a serious health risk on its own, researchers say.

“What we first suspected was that job strain might be related to lifestyle variables - that people who are under high job strain would smoke or maybe eat unhealthy food more, but this was not the case,” said lead study author Karl-Heinz Ladwig, of the Technical University in Munich.

“For me this was the most exciting thing, to find out that these things might not responsible for this unique effect,” he said.

Past research dating back decades has established that jobs with a combination of high demands and low control over how the work is done offer a formula for high worker stress.

That particular kind of job strain has long been linked to heart disease and death. The underlying cause is generally thought to be a mixture of physical wear-and-tear from the chronic stress itself and unhealthy coping behaviors like smoking, drinking and overeating.

A few studies in more recent years have connected this form of worker stress to diabetes, although sometimes the effect was seen only in women or was largely linked to coping behaviors.

To explore the connection further, Ladwig’s team followed more than 5,000 men and women in Germany for over 12 years.

None of the participants had diabetes at the beginning of the study, when each answered a well-established questionnaire to measure job strain. It included 11 questions, some of which focused on job demands, such as having to work fast, hard, under time pressure or with conflicting demands, or having excessive amounts of work.

Other questions were meant to assess the person’s level of job control, including their level of responsibility and competence for the job and ability to make decisions in their current position.

Based on the answers, participants were subdivided into groups: low job strain, high job strain, passive and active.

Participants with demanding jobs who had control over how their work got done, or those with undemanding jobs, were considered to have “low job strain.” Those with high job demands and low control over their work were considered to have “high job strain.”

Apart from job demands, people in jobs that afforded some control were considered “active” and those without control were categorized as “passive.”

Almost 300 cases of type 2 diabetes developed during the follow-up period, and the largest proportion of these, almost 7 percent, came from the high job-strain group, the study team reports in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

The passive or active categories contributed the next largest number of cases, followed by the low job strain group, with 4 percent.

The researchers calculated that the high job strain participants had a 63 percent higher chance of developing diabetes than the low job strain group.

The results held after the team accounted for age, sex, family history of diabetes and weight. The difference did shrink somewhat when researchers factored in socioeconomic status and physical intensity of work, but remained significant.

In general, the participants with high job strain were more often female, physically inactive, smoked and had low education levels. But none of these variables made a difference in the diabetes risk based on job strain.

That suggests the stress itself is causing the effect, Ladwig and his team speculate, and the likely culprit is the stress hormone cortisol, which can alter the way the body regulates blood sugar.

“The rising prevalence of type 2 diabetes is a worldwide concern and this study is investigating the role of job strain in this growing epidemic,” said Mikaela von Bonsdorff, a gerontology researcher at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, who was not involved in the study.

The American Diabetes Association says that by 2050, one in every three Americans will have diabetes

Von Bonsdorff cautions that although the authors found high job strain might increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, it is evident that other factors such as, socioeconomic position and unhealthy living habits may be playing a role.

Loretta Platts, a researcher at Kings College London who also was not involved in the study, said, “It is also possible that the real influence of stressful work on type 2 diabetes might be even larger than is suggested by the results found in this study.”

“The investigators could only measure work stress at one time-point, and it is likely to be the cumulative impact of work stress over individuals’ whole working lives which may affect their chances of developing type 2 diabetes, not necessarily stress happening at any specific time-point,” she said.

“People are very engaged in their job situation and they have no distance from it and I think that we should get into a balanced life situation where working is one part which is important but not the only important thing in the world,” said Ladwig. — Reuters

8 Tips to Help Achieve Your Career Goals

Professionals who are in careers today will change jobs much more frequently than in previous generations. Therefore, you need to be prepared and proactive in managing your career. But does this mean you have to sacrifice in other areas of your life that are important to you? Our lives are busy enough balancing work and family without having to find time for making major career changes as well. The tips below provide you some solid strategies to achieve your career goals.

1. Resume and LinkedIn Profile Maintenance

Write down your accomplishments from the past year. This will help you identify your market worth. Keeping track of these accomplishments will help you in review and bonus time. You probably already know this, but always keep your resume and LinkedIn profile up to date. This will keep you visible in the job market with recruiters or hiring managers.

2. Set up Lunchtime Conversations With Influencers

Connect with the shakers and movers within your organization to develop mutual relationships; if a special project or a higher position opens up, they will be more likely to think of you. Your internal company network is important to your career success. Create a list of people within the organization whom you know personally and professionally and ask to have lunch or a phone or Skype conversation for career advice, information sharing, or just to get to know them better. Remember, it is not what you know, but who you know, that will help you get ahead.

3. Remember to Network

Network face-to-face with one to three people each month outside the company to stay connected to your industry and to develop your networking skills. Identify 10 people whom you lost touch with and with whom you would like to reconnect. Reach out to them, perhaps indicating that one of your 2013 goals is to keep your network active. When you meet with the people in your network, bring something to the table and be sure you are offering value. Also, always be willing to ask them to connect you to others they know.

4. Attend Industry Events

Join your industry professional associations and attend monthly events. Meetup.com, Eventbrite and other online communities are great places to find industry groups that are relevant to you. Find out the dates and times, put them in your calendar and try not to schedule meetings too close to the event, so you will have enough travel time. Bring information to share with your colleagues.

5. Keep Your Image Professional

Update your look with accessories, clothes, hair and eyeglasses to reflect a polished professional image. Keeping an updated look is essential for initial impressions. One new piece of apparel can update your look, if you're not one to shop every single season. On the other end of the spectrum, be cognizant that dressing too trendy can be unappealing in a professional setting. Use the rule of thumb of looking in the mirror to see if you need to eliminate one accessory.

6. Schedule Quarterly Meetings

Set up quarterly meetings with your boss to stay on track with your professional development. Since you need to be the leader in managing your career, you need to take the initiative to set up routine times to conduct professional development meetings. In these meetings, ask your boss what his or her expectations are for your department and position over the next quarter, and if there are ways you could improve from the previous quarter — sometimes, it's necessary to take initiative to get the constructive criticism you need. If your boss is not in your office, recommend using Skype, which is a great way to build a more solid relationship.

7. Review Career Goals

You need to manage your own expectations for yourself, too. Mark your calendar six months out for a review of career goals and make adjustments if necessary. Staying on top of your career goals and periodically reviewing those helps you measure your progress, successes and evaluate the feasibility of accomplishing your remaining goals.

8. Read Industry Books

Read Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People or Keith Ferazzi's Never Eat Alone. Both books reinforce building relationships inside and outside your organization, which is the key to career success. They stand the test of time and capture human interaction and how to master it — the only thing that has changed is the vocabulary. Buy either of these relationship building books on tape, which can ease a public transit commute and help you to develop better skills.

source: mashable.com