Overpayment...do we have rights?

[Lawnewbie]

My husband works as maintenance on the property we live on. It is low-income housing because when we moved here, I was the only one with a job and we qualified to live in low-income housing. When he started the maintenance job, the agreement was to deduct the rent from the hours he worked.

Well, they never deducted the hours for the past 2 1/2 months he's been working and we didn't realize it. The payments were automatically deposited and deposit a day after my job deposits and mine is a bigger deposit, so it's the one we cared about. We didn't pay much attention to what they were depositing. Every time he got a pay stub, he filed it. I know looking back that it's careless and it's one lessong learned...

But they want to NOT pay him for ANY work he does until he pays off the debt. They refuse to let him put in anymore than 30 hours/wk. He has a child support obligation of $500/mo. I can't cover that because the money I get goes to cover the bills. I realize it was irresponsible to not monitor this closely, I'm just wondering if there is any kind of law that says an employer cannot take ALL of an employee's wages, especially when he has a child support obligation. TIA.

[Pattymd]

The employer cannot lower his pay to any less than minimum wage going forward. And when they do this, the child support deduction will be limited to a percentage of disposable income (50 or 55%, depending upon whether he is more than 12 weeks in arrears or not), so he may go into arrears if he does not cover shortage (if there is one) via personal check.

That is the extent of your rights. Sorry, but it is amazing to me how many people that post here don't check their pay stubs, then are "surprised" when the company attempts to recover an overpayment or an amount that should have been deducted but wasn't. Hard lesson learned, isn't it?

[Lawnewbie]

Thanks, Patty, for your response. I already admitted it wasn't very smart. I just wondered what the law was.