I have two supervisors who are on salary. They, on occasion, must work on the ambulance if some one is absent. Is this considered a violation of being Exempt? As I know it, they do not get paid overtime, but we request that they take a day off during the week if they are on the ambulance.

Once in a while filling in is not going to disrupt exempt status. If you choose to allow them an extra day off during the week, you certainly can do so.

I hate California's laws, but in the rest of the country, supervisors can be exempt from overtime. The occasional grunt work won't change that.

I would guess that California is the same, but leave it to Megan, Barry or tjpass (?) to address that state's requirements for exempt employees in that particular field. (why do they have so many different wage orders?)

What if we ask them to keep a consistent schedule on the ambulance and part in the office. Example - two days on the ambulance (either a 12 or 24 hour shift) and two to three days in the office. Will this then change or violate the exempt rules?

Oh, I would say you are pushing the envelope!

Again, I defer to CA experts and I am certainly not one of those!

That is why I ask. :D We are a new company and we are growing fast. I am trying to keep us on the up and up. Any one with CA knowledge please help. Not trying to under mind you ScottB, you info is very helpful.

Straight from the horsey's mouth. ;)
http://www.dir.ca.gov/IWC/IWCArticle4.pdf

Doesn't California follow federal guidelines for the test of exemption (except salary requirements)?

California's is more restrictive.
http://www.dir.ca.gov/IWC/IWCArticle4.pdf

I am not sure where all the hostility to California is coming from. In this case, the Federal Regulations are the exact same as California in defining what is "exempt work." Specifically:

29 CFR 541.706(a)
An exempt employee will not lose the exemption by performing work of a normally nonexempt nature because of the existence of an emergency. Thus, when emergencies arise that threaten the safety of employees, a cessation of operations or serious damage to the employer’s property, any work performed in an effort to prevent such results is considered exempt work.
(b)
An ‘‘emergency’’ does not include occurrences that are not beyond control or for which the employer can reasonably provide in the normal course of business. Emergencies generally occur only rarely, and are events that the employer cannot reasonably anticipate.
...
Replacing a nonexempt employee during the first day or partial day of an illness may be considered exempt emergency work depending on factors such as the size of the establishment and of the executive’s department, the nature of the industry, the consequences that would flow from the failure to replace the ailing employee immediately, and the feasibility of filling the employee’s place promptly.


The above regulations imply that an employee who fills in during non-emergency situations would be considered non-exempt. In fact, if you look at what it is saying, it would appear that California law would be more employer friendly in this case. California has a fairly simple 50% rule. That is, you can do non-exempt work as long as it does not amount to 50% of your total work time.

This Federal regulation seems to imply that any significant work beyond an "emergency" would cause the employee to loose the exemption. If not, then there is really no need for this regulation as its analysis would fall in line with all the other "primary duty" analysis. That is, if the Federal exemptions already allowed an exempt "supervisor" to fill in one or two days a week to perform clearly non-exempt functions, then this section of the regulations would be superfluous. As such, the likely reading is that in non-emergency substitution scenarios, the Federal regulations are more likely to cause you to loose the exemption than California's simple 50% rule.

Indeed, you can find just such reasoning in the "old" federal regulations that explain what this section might be talking about:
An employee will not qualify for exemption as an executive if he devotes more than 20 percent, or in the case of an employee of a retail or service establishment if he devotes as much as 40 percent, of his hours worked in the workweek to nonexempt work. This test is applied on a workweek basis and the percentage of time spent on nonexempt work is computed on the time worked by the employee.

Of course, you must follow both State and Federal requirements, so while the "supervisors" in this case would likely be exempt from California overtime, they would likely be covered by the provisions of the FLSA and need to be paid overtime for hours past 40 in the week. In addition, because California is so employer friendly, if you violated California overtime law, you are only liable for the amount of unpaid overtime. If you violate the FLSA, you are liable for twice that amount -- and the employees can sue the owners/managers of the company directly (something you can't do for California overtime).

As a final note, ambulance employees would be covered by Wage Order #9. The link Patty gave was for #4.

California employer friendly!? No!! Never! Ask anyone here and they will tell you! California is so anti-employer, it's nearly impossible to do business here! Jeez Louise! Where have you been all this time! Employers are always getting the lousy end of the deal. It's got so bad, my employer can't even afford his two homes and had to reduce his 12 weeks vacation to 11 last year!

The problem for HR people is not the laws themselves.

The problem is that in the other 49 states, the laws don't change drastically. There are minor things like what is minimum wage and whether or not vacation has to be paid out at term, but you know those difference are there so it's fairly easy to apply benefits and polices more or less equally from one site/state to another.

And then you have your employees in California, who have a completely different set of laws that you have to be aware of and somehow manage to apply without setting your employee morale in an uproar.

I've worked for multi-site, multi-state employers where we genuinely could not afford to apply California's benefits to all our employees in other states, but it's an employee relations nightmare when you have one set of employees getting things that the others don't. And no, the owners did not have multiple high priced homes and twelve weeks vacation; they lived in the suburbs, sent their kids to public school and those of us who worked beside them cheered when they finally took a day off.

So it's not the laws; it's the inequity.

Cbg, balancing the legal complexities of California with keeping up employee morale is the reason why you HR people get paid the big bucks. If it were easy, then anyone could do it.

What I get paid can't be called big bucks.

cbg What I get paid can't be called big bucks.

I agree..!!