Recently in Wages & Benefits Category

Health insurance deductibles doubled in just the last seven years, reports The New York Times.

In a study conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, it was found that between 2003 and 2010, total premiums for family coverage rose by 50 percent. Total health insurance premiums are those that are paid for by both employers and workers combined.

Workers found that they bear a great deal of the total health insurance premiums’ burden: their share increased by 63 percent over that period.

The paralegal overtime lawsuit against a local law firm called the Mostyn Firm previously received some play on FindLaw's Houston Employment Law News Blog.

At the time, the case was at the initial stages. It involved a paralegal named Sherri Davis, who alleged that she had not received overtime pay despite regularly working more than 40 hours per week.

Sherri Davis had not only been arguing on her behalf, however. She had also been trying to get a "class-action" status for the other paralegals at Mostyn.

The U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has put out a new, revised set of requirements for commercial truck drivers, reports Employer Brief.

The commercial drivers' hours of services reduce by 12 hours the maximum a truck driver can work in a week. That means that instead of 82 hours maximum within a seven-day span, the new rule limits drivers to 70 hours.

Also, truck drivers can't drive after working eight hours unless they take a 30 minute break. They may take this break whenever they feel like it.

Nurses at Cypress Fairbanks Medical Center (Cy-Fair) are protesting their sick leave policy by going to the National Labor Relations Board, reports the Houston Chronicle:

Brenda Landreville, a labor and delivery nurse at the 180-bed hospital and chief negotiator for the nurses’ bargaining unit, said hospital policy allows nurses to be fired after six absences within a calendar year, and that they receive a verbal warning on the third absence.

“It encourages nurses to work when they’re sick,” Landreville said, “exposing fragile hospital patients and our co-workers to illness.”

Obviously, one of Cy-Fair’s administrators, Lisa White, denied any wrong-doing. The hospital’s position is that if you get someone to work in your place, then your absence doesn’t count.

Employers have to give each employee their W-2 by January 31, 2012, for individual income tax purposes, reports Employer Brief. Employers are mandated to file a form W-2 for wages paid to each employee for whom income, social security, or medicare taxes were withheld; or, for whom income tax would have been withheld if the employee hadn't claimed more than one withholding allowance.

But getting to proper W-2 procedures requires meeting certain other more basic requirements that an employer must meet. The foremost of this is that the employer must have an Employer Identification Number.

The healthcare staffing agency, Jackson Therapy Partners, will be paying $134,073 in back wages to 40 nonimmigrant H-1B employees after an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division, reports Employer Brief.

Investigations revealed that Jackson Therapy Partners had failed to pay the nonimmigrant H-1B workers the required wage rate for the time between their arrival from the Philippines to when they reported to work. Under H-1B, workers must be paid for all non-productive time caused by their employers, reports Employer Brief.

A Carrollton company called Hilton Reservations and Customer Care agreed to pay $715,507 in minimum and overtime back wages after an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, reports Employer Brief.

Hilton Reservations and Customer Care owed the money to 2,645 current and former customer service employees. The former employees alleged that they weren’t paid for work they did before clocking into their shifts. This included: booting up computers, opening programs, and reading pertinent emails. And because this time was not included in their hours, the employees alleged they also didn’t get the right amount of overtime. The former employees alleged violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Delta pilots are fighting for lost pension benefits, nearly $600 million in total, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Delta, which until 2005, had a major airport hub in Texas, is still quite a big player across the South.

The Delta pilots with the lost pension benefits, who organize under the Delta Pilot's Pension Preservation Organization, will be filing an appeal with the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). The appeal will argue that each pilot lost on average $1,200 after Delta artificially reduced the total pension fund during a bankruptcy, reports the AJC.

The unpaid film interns from the Aronofsky film, Black Swan, have a lawsuit against the producers, asking for fair wages, reports the New York Times.

Led by Eric Glatt and Alex Footman, who interned on the film produced by Fox Searchlight, the plaintiffs argue that the menial work the interns did should have been done by paid employees. For example, Footman, 24, was tasked with making sure the coffee pot was full, taking lunch orders, and taking out the trash. He believes he should have been paid for this kind of work.

Sometimes trial lawyers get tried. That is the case with the Mostyn Law Firm of Houston, which is being sued by a disgruntled paralegal, reports the Southeast Texas Record.

The paralegal, named Sherri Davis, is alleging that she did not receive the overtime she was owed. She alleges that she regularly worked more than 40 hours per week and was not given time-and-a-half.

Not only is Sherri Davis bringing the lawsuit on her behalf, but also on behalf of a “class” of current and former paralegals at the Mostyn Law Firm who were allegedly not given the one-and-a-half overtime rate that they were allegedly owed.