Hello Everyone,

We are a manufacturing company located in PA and have recently opened up a branch office in Texas.    Two of our employees who are operators at a customer's drilling site turned in timesheets that stated that they worked for 24 hours for straight 5 days.   

What are Texas laws on this?    

Thanks! 

 

what type of law do you want to know about? are you dubious--i certainly would be--about the claimed hours and want to take some type of action against the employees? first, i would check with the employees to see why they entered the hours that way. there might be an innocent explanation such as they made a mistake, maybe not.

 

 

Dubious, yes!  This is what we were told:  "We were there on site, only took a two hour nap each day, and went right back to work."  And the supervisor vouched for both of them.  Since my post the supervisor called back and one employee was reduced to 18 hours for each day and the other to 12 hours.  What should be my next step?  Should I write them up?

Since we are in PA I will need to get familiar any and all Texas labor laws, etc.  We recently opened up offices in Virginia and Colorado, too  Can you point me in the right direction?

P.S.  I was hired as an HR Assistant one year ago (with no experience).  Now I am doing 95% of all HR!  I want do the best job I can and am very nervous about all this!

 

Aside from state laws, you need to make sure that you comply with federal labor laws, especially FLSA.  If the employees actually worked those hours, they must be paid, including overtime for hours over 40 per week.  If they worked those hours without authorization, they can be disciplined, but they still must be paid.

 

 

Since you are looking at employees in multiple states I would start by looking at the wage and hour laws in each of those states.  Here is the website for VA:

http://www.doli.virginia.gov/whatwedo/labor_law/powp1_faq.html

Also if you have a subscription to this HR.BLR.com, they have some neat spreadsheets that talk about different laws in all of the states (state comparison charts).  Some of the topics are background checks, deductions from pay, drug and alcohol, rest periods, minimum wage, hiring, etc.

 

Thank you all for your help.   Being new to HR, I'm sure I am going to have a lot more questions down the road!  

Texas has no meal or break laws.  I think there is a statute preventing an employer from working a retail sales employee more than 6 days in a row or something like that.  The hours are legal.

However, this gets back to the whole "engaged to wait" versus "waiting to be engaged" debate.  If they were taking a 2 hour nap because they chose not to go do something else (assuming they aren't out in the middle of nowhere or on an off shore rig), then those are not hours engaged to wait and would not have been compensable in the first place.  Someone needs to drill down (no pun intended) on what they were actually doing and when to determine which hours were compensable and which were not.

I suggest this : http://www.twc.state.tx.us/news/efte/tocmain.html  very strongly.

If you are new to HR, I would definately join SHRM. WWW.SHRM.ORG has fantastic resources, even live chat to answer imediate questions.  The best money I have ever spent.  Also, I echo another response, use the resources here on WWW.BLR.COM

 

 

I joined SHRM last week and I have found HRBLR to be extremely helpful, especially these forums.  I attend my first training seminar next week.  If there is anything else that you all can think of, I am open to suggestions!