LinkedIn pays $5.8 million in overtime back wages, damages

LinkedIn, a social network for professionals, has paid $5.8 million to former and current employees at its offices in California, New York, Illinois and Nebraska. The payment includes more than $2.5 million for damages and more than $3.3 million for overtime back wages for 359 people.

This move followed a U.S. Department of Labor investigation that discovered LinkedIn violated the Fair Labor Standard Act. The company failed to document, balance and pay its employees for all of the weekly hours that they worked. Some of the workers were apparently off the clock and did not receive overtime wages, which is against federal wage laws.

LinkedIn says that its priority is to settle this situation and ensure that its employees are paid for all of the hours that they have worked. It added that the issue was that it did not have the right tools to document hours appropriately for a small section of its sales workforce, and it started to remedy the issue even before the DOL approached it. The DOL praised the company for paying the total amount and for taking steps to ensure that the error does not happen again.

In California, section 510 of the Labor Code requires that workers receive 1.5 times their regular wage if they work more than eight hours in a single day, more than 40 hours in a single work week or up to eight hours on the seventh day of a workweek. If employees work more than 12 hours in a single day or more than eight hours on the seventh day of a work week, they shall receive double the regular wage.

Employees who do not believe that they are receiving payment for all of the hours that they work have the option to file a complaint with the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division. In addition, by taking the case to court, the workers might be able to recover the wages that they were not paid and could receive compensation for damages resulting from the nonpayment.

Source: U.S. Department of Labor, ‘Minimum Wage Laws in the States”

Source: The Financial Times, “LinkedIn pays nearly $6m to settle labour violations“, Hannah Kuchler and Gina Chon, August 04, 2014