Labor Department orders LinkedIn to pay damages to employees for overtime.
According to an announcement made by the Department of Labor on August 4, 2014, professional networking site LinkedIn has agreed to issue $3.3 million in overtime back pay with $2.5 million in damages to 359 of its current and former employees.
The regulators found that LinkedIn was not keeping a track of the total number of hours that employees were putting in. LinkedIn branches in Nebraska, California, New York and Illinois are said to have been affected by this decision.
The Labor Department said that LinkedIn “has shown a great deal of integrity by fully cooperating with the investigators and stepping up to the plate without any hesitation which will help workers whole.”
On the other hand, LinkedIn says that the issue was a “function of not having the right tools in place for a small subset of the sales force” which would help to track hours properly.
Susana Blanco, the Director of Labor Department’s San Francisco office in a statement said, “Off the clock’ hours are all too common for the American worker.”
Blanco added, “this practice harms the workers and denies them the wages that they rightfully earned and takes away time with families.”
The Labor Department also said that LinkedIn has promised to train all their company’s non-exempt employees to refuse “off-the-clock-work”.
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) demands that non-exempt workers – unsalaried managers – must be paid the federal minimum hourly wage amount which is – $7.25.
Photo Credits: Financial Express
