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I working as a CA exempt employee and do not receive overtime pay. I am being paid 31,000 a year. I just realized that i must be getting paid 2xtimes min wage or about 33,000 a year as an exempt employee in CA.
I've been working for the company for 1 year. What do i have to gain if i bring up the issue. I work for a large corporation and I am a little scared the issue might ruin my potential to be promoted in the company as i was already promised a substantially better position within a year when the position opens.
Please help. What do i have to gain by raising the issue. is this a big deal?
I know that by july 1st of 2014 it will go up to 37,000.
Interesting. California seems to be different from other states when it comes to all sorts of employment laws. The federal guideline, which many states follow, works out to a little over $23,000 a year. California's law seems more "fair" because the exempt designation has expanded so much that it includes all sorts of white collar workers and is often abused... when someone is only making $23K a year, many hourly workers who are eligible for overtime actually end up making much more than the supposedly higher-level "exempt" employee.
I would raise the question with HR in a non-confrontational way. It's a perfectly normal thing to ask. Just say you're confused and want to better understand what exempt means and how the minimum pay is calculated. They may well have a good explanation for it. Pure speculation here, but I have worked in several places Ãn which "full-time" is budgeted to be 35 hours a week, not 40. The budgeted number of hours doesn't matter if you're using the federal guidelines, since that dictates a flat amount of pay per week, but the idea of using an hourly minimum wage to do the calculation might complicate things and allow more flexibility. Or, perhaps they do the calculation without considering the weeks in which you're paid for vacation but not actually working. (Again, I have no background in HR but I do have quite a lot of experience in dealing with HR to figure why something is one way when I expected it to be another way.) There may be other things to do with timing or whatever. I don't know. Or, they may have made an error.
Your last line... do you mean that you know your salary is set to go to $37,000 in July, or that the minimum for exempt employees is set to hit that amount in July?
Just to add... in my experience 1.) large corporations are on top of the employment laws so errors of this sort would be rare, but 2.) there's also much less of a chance that a simple question like this will sabotage your employment prospects in any way. (This is a totally normal question and shouldn't sabotage your chances anywhere, but at a very small company I suppose it could be seen as "strident" or something and rub someone the wrong way.)
What sort of position do you have, anyway? In which exempt category do you fall?
Last edited by cowbell76; 02-03-2014 at 09:04 PM..
Stuff like this slips through big corporations all the time. When you're talking about a variable of $0.50/hr on minimum wage - it's more than likely an oversight.
Personally, I'd go straight to your boss and let them know there must be a calculation error on either the schedules hours or base pay.
Stuff like this slips through big corporations all the time. When you're talking about a variable of $0.50/hr on minimum wage - it's more than likely an oversight.
Personally, I'd go straight to your boss and let them know there must be a calculation error on either the schedules hours or base pay.
The reason I think it's unlikely this would have just "slipped through the cracks" is that this person has only worked there for a year and minimum wage has not changed in that time. HR would have to have some minimum figure for all exempt employees and I think it's unlikely that they would be offered less than the minimum number. Typically for an exempt employee (and even often white collar hourly employees) the offer is made in terms of annual salary. I think it's unlikely that an annual salary of a couple thousand less than the minimum requirement would be offered without the error being noticed, unless they haven't updated their information in a few years and the problem is widespread across all new hires of the same level.
Where it gets more complicated is when it comes to longer-term employees, minimum wage changing over the years, the company's financial health and freezing of wages during bad times, etc.. I could totally see salaries somehow not keeping up with the required minimum in such a case.
Last edited by cowbell76; 02-03-2014 at 09:05 PM..
My job title is along the lines of Record keeper. Although I do much more and end up acting as a corporate representative in court. I travel across the country frequently to appear for court.
Perhaps it did slip through as my office quite small and the headquarters is based on the east coast. I don't see how location of the company headqAurters would change anything since I live and go to the office in ca.
If my wage goes to 9$ that means the ca exempt min will be a salary around 37k. This will go into affect July 1st 2014. My question is will my salary for 2014 have to be no less than 37k total for the year? Or will this only effect the last half of 2014? Meaning my yearly income will be an average of 33k and 37k or exactly 37k or more for the year.
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