Overtime & Minimum Wage

If you work more than forty hours per week without being paid extra wages for the overtime hours you work, you should consult with a NY employment attorney familiar with New York State and federal overtime laws to discuss your legal rights and options.

The experienced New York minimum wage and overtime lawyers of The Bright Firm can help you understand this sometimes complex area of the law and help you recover any money you are owed.

Don’t allow yourself to be exploited. Our overtime lawyers have collected millions of dollars on behalf of underpaid employees. Contact us today to discuss your potential overtime or minimum wage claim with one of our experienced NYC employment lawyers.

Most employees are required to be paid overtime pay if they work more than forty hours in a week. The overtime laws, however, exempt certain types of workers, such as executives and administrators, from their protection. It is very common for employers to try to evade their obligation to pay employees overtime wages by improperly classifying large groups of employees as exempt administrative employees, or dishonestly or mistakenly treating them as though they fall under another statutory exemption. White collar and professional employees working as financial analysts, IT support professionals and troubleshooters, content developers, writers and editors working in digital media, traditional publishing, marketing and advertising, public relations professionals, and bank and consulting firm employees are often mistakenly told they are exempt from overtime pay requirements and underpaid for the long hours they work in violation of state and federal law.

Just because your employer tells you you are exempt from overtime laws does not mean that you are, in fact, exempt from the law’s protections. This is true even if you are paid an annual or weekly salary, rather than an hourly rate. Even if your employer has you sign an agreement in which you supposedly agree that you are exempt from the law and therefore not entitled to receive overtime pay, you are still legally entitled to be paid one and a half times your normal hourly rate of pay for any hours you work above forty hours in a week if the type of work you perform is, in reality, non-exempt work under the relevant statutory definitions.

The same laws that mandate overtime pay for overtime hours worked also impose minimum wage requirements on employers. In industries where employees customarily work for tips, employers can, if they follow proper procedures, take a “tip credit” that allows them to pay tipped employees a lower hourly wage than the standard minimum wage. But employers routinely fail to follow the law’s requirements and, by doing so, forfeit any right to apply a “tip credit” toward the minimum wage, in which case even tipped employees, like restaurant wait staff, must be paid no less than the full, current minimum hourly wage rate, regardless of how much they also earn in tips. New York State’s current minimum wage requirements are summarized here.