WAGE & HOUR
Federal and Ohio wage and hour laws exist to protect workers and make sure they are paid a fair wage, including a minimum wage, overtime pay and prevailing wages on public works projects. Nevertheless, employers violate wage and hour laws in many ways. Whether due to innocent mistakes, negligent bookkeeping or intentional breaches of the law, wage and hour violations rob you of money that is rightfully yours. Columbus wage & hour attorneys Matthew Coffman and Adam Gedling of Coffman Legal will fight to see that you get all the money you earned and are compensated for the harm done to you by an employer’s wage theft.
Most employees in Ohio must receive at least the Ohio minimum wage of $8.55 an hour, increasing to $8.70 in 2020. However, other workers are exempt from the minimum wage requirement altogether. Employers may intentionally or mistakenly apply the wrong minimum wage to your job, causing you to lose thousands of dollars a year or they may fail to pay you the minimum wage that you are entitled to receive.
Overtime mistakes are perhaps the most common wage & hour violations that Ohio employees experience. Workers may be misclassified as exempt employees or independent contractors when they are really non-exempt employees entitled to overtime. Other times, overtime goes unpaid due to poor record-keeping, miscalculations of pay or time worked, improper deductions, or outright refusal to pay overtime. Our firm is experienced in the full range of unpaid overtime issues, including mistakes, intentional failures, and complex issues such as successfully challenging classifications of non-exempt workers entitled to overtime.
Construction workers and trade laborers are entitled to be paid the prevailing wage on state and federal public works and public improvement projects, yet contractors and subcontractors sometimes violate prevailing wage laws by failing to pay the correct prevailing wage rate, failing to include benefits when calculating the prevailing wage, not paying overtime correctly, making improper deductions, and committing other errors.
Ohio law requires employers to pay employees their earned wages promptly. If you are not being paid promptly at the end of a pay period, if your former boss is holding up your final paycheck after you quit or got fired, or if you accrued paid time off that your former employer is not compensating you for, we want to hear from you. Our Columbus wage & hour practice helps employees solve unpaid wage issues throughout Ohio.
Restaurants are legally allowed to pay their wait staff less than the minimum wage since these workers also receive tips as a regular part of their pay. However, there are numerous rules for paying tipped employees to make sure they are not treated unfairly, and there are many ways employers can violate the wage laws for tipped employers. At Coffman Legal, we help tipped employees recover damages for wage violations, including unpaid wages, unlawful deductions, illegal tip pools, and miscalculation of overtime.
It is common for multiple employees to be afflicted with the same wage and hour violations, such as unpaid overtime or unpaid wages. An entire workforce may be harmed because employers often apply the same timekeeping and payroll practices to all employees. The FLSA allows an affected worker to bring a collective action against the employer on behalf of all concerned employees. There is strength in numbers, and a collective action gets the attention of the employer and levels the playing field in an otherwise unequal employer-employee relationship. Coffman Legal routinely prosecutes FLSA collective actions involving hundreds or thousands of employees. We have the knowledge, skills, and resources necessary to handle the largest claims against the biggest employers.
If you have been the victim of any wage & hour violation in the state of Ohio, call Coffman Legal at 614-949-1181 for a free consultation with an experienced and aggressive Columbus wage & hour attorneys.