I am an installer for a door company in arizona. I was hired on there 6 months ago and have started running across a lot of information about OT pay that makes me think i am really getting taken advantage of.

The company I work for went from paying piece rate on doors and other items installed to what they call a tier pay scale. The tiers are based on the number of doors one is capable of installing per day.

My tier pay is $45k per year and I am required to install 3 doors and do one service call per day. That is the salary/ pay scale I agreed on and the salary/ pay scale that I signed up for. More and more often I have been showing up to the shop in the morning with more than my tier worth of work loaded on my cart. I am expected to complete this extra work with no extra pay.

They are now requiring all the installers to be on a rotating shift so that at least one installer shows up to the shop at 5:00 am instead of our normal 6:30 start time, to help with hardware and doors. They expect this of us and also expect us to do this for free. This was not part of my initial job description, can they make me do more work without compensation?

There is also the issue that we all work A LOT more than 40 hours per week with no compensation for it. We are all forced to write down 8 hours per day on our time cards or we are written up and given an unpaid days off. We do not get paid for days we don't work which makes me believe I am non-exempt salary. If I am wrong about being non-exempt then I know they can do whatever they want and there is nothing I can do about it.

Can someone tell me what I should do? Should I get an attorney? Should I make a written complaint to the company? Should I file a complaint with the DOL?

"Salary" is merely a pay method. The type of work you do is nonexempt, so you must be paid overtime when you work more than 40 hours in a workweek. And ALL work you do must be paid for, that includes the prep work early in the morning, paperwork, "after hours" work, etc.

Try to reconstruct to the best of your ability, the hours you have worked under this new pay scale. And do this now every day; keep the records at home. You can file a claim for unpaid overtime pay with the ICA (what Arizona calls it's Dept. of Labor). Assuming you are not being paid using the Fluctuating Work Week method (and you would have had to agree to that), you must be paid 1.5 times your "regular rate of pay" for your overtime hours. Also assuming your "salary" is intended to cover 40 hours per week, that would be $21.63 * 1.5 = $32.45 per overtime hour.

It appears as though the employer is paying you as though you were "exempt". Have you asked about why you are not getting overtime pay under this new compensation plan? What does the employer say?

BTW, that was not a long post. You should see some of them we get. ;)

Let me try to explain how our pay works. They take a base salary of $45k/yr and devide it by 52 weeks in a year, then they devide that by 5 days a week and that gives them my daily salary of $173.08. If I show up to work, no matter how much work I do, I get paid $173.08. If I don't show up, I don't get paid. The agreement that was made, is that $173.08 is being paid to me based on installing 3 doors and completing 1 service call every day. It is getting more and more common for them to add an extra door or an extra service call to my day and expecting me to do it without extra compensation.

I spent some time talking to a couple other employees yesterday and here is something else I have come up with. Aparently, when these new employees were hired, they were told by our immediate boss "I can't legally tell you what to write on your time card, but if you want to work all 5 days of the week you need to make sure you don't get over 40 hours."

In reading my employee handbook, it says nothing about a fluctuating work week, and as far as I can remember, I never agreed to that.

I also just found out that a lot of the guys have been working extra days on our days off and are getting their normal compensation. They are not being compensated for the overtime, even after working 5 full days.

You are saying start keeping track of all of this? How long should I put up with this? I know that if I go into the office by myself and make any kind of waves as far as the pay goes, they will just fire me. The main thing they have been saying to us all is "the economy is bad and we have over 300 applicants, you can be replaced". I am to a point now where I don't want to deal with it any more, but if it will help me out in the long run, I will stick around for a while and start keeping records of everything.

Even if they are trying to use the fluctuating work week pay method, it would fail because you are docked when you miss a day of work. So, that's not going to fly.

It is legally the employer's responsibility to keep accurate records of hours worked for nonexempt employees. If they are telling employees to falsify their time cards, they would be in even more trouble.

Here are the instructions for filing a wage claim (or a civil suit) in Arizona. You have one year for the wage claim. Or you can file a civil claim for up to three times the amount owed; not sure how long you have to do that. An attorney might also be interested in a class action suit, if other employees like you would be interested.

Employers who voluntarily choose to not comply with the law just because "the economy is bad" make me :mad: .

My biggest issue is that I know if I go into the office and raise a stink about the hours and not being compensated, they are just going to fire me and come up with some BS reason for it. Since AZ is a right to work state, I feel like I would have no chance for a wrongful termination suit.

Semantical issue; right to work means you don't have to join a union to get work. You mean Arizona (like every other state except Montana and sometimes even Montana) is an employment at will state.

The DOL's of most states are pretty good at figuring it out when an employee who has complained about illegal wage payments is suddenly fired for someone minor a bit later.