Employers seek clarification on a variety of state labor regulations

Employers are unclear and unhappy about a litany of state labor laws, and laws about record-keeping for salaried employees are high on the list.

They aired those concerns when members of the Nevada Association of Employers and the Northern Nevada Human Resources Association met with Nevada State Labor Commissioner Michael Tanchek.

A big complaint: Discrepancies between state and federal law on the categories of workers who need to keep timesheets to calculate overtime pay.

Nevada Association of Employers Executive Director Jim Nelson, who organized the session, says the human resource people were encouraged to hear the labor commissioner say that he was amenable to aligning state and federal law.

States can have standards that are stricter than federal law, but not more lenient. So, employees who are exempt from some requirements under federal law may not be exempt under state law.

And it is those discrepancies between state and federal law that get confusing. Some of the differences are those that specify the jobs defined as professions, specify which workers must be paid overtime, and specify who must track hours they work.

Nevada law requires that employers keep time records for all employees, even those on salary.

Only professionals are exempt. But there, too, the laws differ.

Under federal law, many jobs are considered professions, but state law says a professional is one who is licensed or certified by a state agency. That limits professions in the state's eyes to a group that's primarily physicians, engineers, and architects.

That means that jobs such as system analyst and information technology manager in the computer field are not professions, says Tanchek.

And it means employers must keep records of time worked for a huge class of workers once viewed as exempt.

Tanchek nixes the old dodge of calling the janitor "vice president of maintenance" so he needn't be paid overtime. Likewise, he says, an exempt administrator does not perform clerical work, but rather, sets company policy.

Calculating time worked brings its own set of problems, such as how to figure fractions of an hour worked.

Professionals sometimes will bill their time to one-tenth of an hour, says Tanchek. So when paying hourly workers, employers should do the same. But if a time clock rounds back to 5 minutes, it must also round forward equally.

While outside salespeople whose earnings are based on commission are exempt from payment of overtime, an employer should still track the time of salespeople who work out of the office.

But salespeople spend a lot of time schmoozing is time spent on the golf course or at three-martini lunches compensable?

"That's judged on a case-by-case basis," says Tanchek. "The regulations are written for the 90 percent of the people who work an eight-hour day."

More changes may be in store.

Voters this fall will decide whether to amend the Nevada Constitution to tie the minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index. Result: The minimum wage could rise every year.

The change also would create a two-tier system. If a company does not provide health insurance, it must pay $1 more per hour.

And laws don't always please even the workers. While some would prefer comp time in lieu of overtime pay, said human resource people present at the session, federal law prohibits it.

Another complaint from HR: When a disgruntled employee files a complaint that the labor commission dismisses, employers are not notified of the outcome. And a full 68 percent of claims filed result in no liability to the employer, says Tanchek.

The construction trades generate 95 percent of all investigations, he adds.

Changing laws result in confusion among employers.

A year ago, says Tanchek, Nevada employers were exempt from paying time and a half for daily overtime if the employee made more than one and a half times the minimum wage, or over $7.72 an hour. But no longer.

The new system creates nine categories of payment, and employers complain of confusion.

"It's confusing to enforce, as well," says Tanchek.