The story of a ‘manager’ and how she recovered her overtime pay
Maribel Gonzalez worked for a luggage company initially as an accounts payable clerk. With her hard work, she was later promoted and was given the title of Office Manager and was classified as a “salaried” employee. Despite the change in title, she mostly performed clerical and other general routine office duties, such as ordering office supplies, tracking personnel schedules, submitting employee hours to payroll personnel, entering invoices into databases, assisting in the compilation of monthly accounting reports, and cutting checks for payments of office bills.
Maribel regularly worked 10 to 11 hours per day including Saturdays. She was not paid overtime for work beyond 8 hours per day or more than 40 hours per week. She was told that since she was a “manager” and she was salaried, she was therefore an “exempt” employee and not entitled to overtime.
Maribel did not hire or fire employees, nor did she decide on whether employees are to be promoted or disciplined. She did not create company policies, although she issued memos containing the policies of the company president. Neither did she decide how company equipment and other resources were to be used. In sum, Maribel did not perform work that was executive or managerial in nature and which would make her an employee exempt from overtime.
California’s overtime law strictly applies the “executive,” “managerial,” and “professional” exemptions. An employee’s true exempt status is not determined by fancy titles. Although an employee is called a “manager” this does not make him or her automatically exempt from overtime pay. Neither is an employer’s arbitrary categorization of the employee as exempt legally binding. True exempt status is determined primarily by an employee’s actual duties.
Executives or managers must perform managerial, not merely ministerial, duties. These duties include managing the business, hiring, firing, and disciplining employees, deciding on employee salaries and wages, and creating work policies and procedures. Simply issuing memos on work policies when these actually come from upper management is not enough.
To be truly exempt from overtime, an employee must not only perform these managerial duties. These duties must take up more than 50% of their work time. For example, if managers work 10-hour days, they must spend more than 5 hours per day on managerial work.
Some employers ask their employees to work more than 8 hours per day or more than 40 hours per week and avoid paying them overtime by misclassifying them as “exempt.” Misclassification results in loss of substantial wages to the employees.
Happily for Maribel, we fought for her wage claim in court and were able to recover her back wages in the amount of $88,740. She did not have to spend any out-of-pocket expenses. The wages she recovered were in addition to the significant attorneys’ fees and litigation costs that were separately paid by the employer.
Next week, we will talk about the story of an in-house sales representative.
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