Articles Posted in wage act

In an effort to avoid their obligations under the Massachusetts Wage Act (“Wage Act”), many employers now condition the payment of commission on continued employment.  Sometimes those same employers the fire employees to avoid the commissions because the employee was not working when the commission came due.  This may no longer work. The Wage Act…

Many families in Massachusetts use au pairs to care for their children.  The United States Department of State (“DOS”) administers this “Au Pair Program,” whereby foreign nationals obtain a special type of visa and are placed with host families in the United States, so that the foreign nationals may provide in-home childcare services to the…

Employers work hard to make sure employees can’t hire their own lawyers. One way to do that is to make sure employee-side lawyers cannot get paid, and that typically means fighting the court award of attorney’s fees. An interesting question arose recently. Is an employee who settles a case under the Wage Act still entitled to an…

Employees in Colorado will have increased rights under the state’s Wage Protection Act of 2014. The law has been expanded to give the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE) more power to pursue wage claims on behalf of the employee. The new law also includes the expansion of the state’s wage payment law to…

Serious failure to reimburse employees for the business expenses they incur in their jobs may be tantamount to unlawful deductions from wages. In Fraelick v. PerkettPR, Inc., Fraelick sought such reimbursement from her employer, after a couple years’ worth of failures. While business expenses had never counted as unpaid wages under the Wage Act, the…

A simple discretionary clause in a commission plan does not disqualify earned commissions from protection of the Wage Act. Prudential Insurance offered commissions to its sales employees under a commission plan. Prudential retained the discretion to interpret and administer the plan, and to deny earned commissions to those employees Prudential terminated for cause, including poor…

A Massachusetts man who was paid after being laid off, will receive even more money because his former employer failed to specify that the extra money was for unpaid vacation days. In Dixon v. City of Malden, Mr. Dixon was dismissed from his role as a director of a nursing home, and at the time…

In what seems like an obvious decision, the Supreme Judicial Court struck down EDS’s policy to deny employees a payout of earned vacation upon termination. The decision, Electronic Data Systems Corporation v. Attorney General, confirmed that when an employee earns vacation and is fired, the employer must pay out that employee for all vacation earned…

Employers can not coerce employees to work for free, deferring wages until the occurrence of some event. Oftentimes employers short of cash turn to their number one expense item, employee wages. In an effort to reduce their expenses some employers take their needs to an extreme, asking employees to work for free, accruing wages on…

Lobbyists for big business have had legislation filed to turn back the clock on Massachusetts employees. The bill, “An Act regarding treble damages” (H3583), marks an effort to shift the burdens onto employees in cases where employers have failed to pay proper wages. If passed, this bill would change the Wage Act to require every…