Think You’re Working for Peanuts? How About Working for Pizza?
Compensation. It’s at the forefront of everyone’s minds, especially HR professionals looking to recruit top talent with a competitive salary and to keep current employees sticking around. Recently, a supermarket in Australia came under fire for offering its employees pizza instead of paying them overtime … Which every U.S. employer should know is illegal under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
New Zealand Herald reports that a Western Australian Coles supermarket posted a notice to staff asking them to work on a Sunday to help unload large quantities of back stock. Their compensation: Pizza. The notice read:
Dear Team,
I have a personal request from you all.
As you can see we have an enormous amount of stock out the back in the stockroom.
I’m asking team members to give me 4hrs free labour.
Yes, it is a big ask and I would not be requesting this unless it was absolutely necessary.
On Sunday the 19th I plan to work through 6x pallets of stock as well as 78x cages of stock out the back.
I plan to kick off the evening at 5:30pm and work through to 9:30pm. Pizza will be plentiful at 9:30pm.
We have 65 team members. It would be wonderful if everyone could be involved as this would make the job so much easier and may even allow us to leave earlier which would be fantastic.
The excess stock we have does affect everyone in the store and more so than [redacted] who has to do the gap scan everyday under these really difficult conditions.
Therefore[,] I hope that you can give [some] of your time to help the store get on top of this once and for all. I would really appreciate you coming to help.
First off, not only is this highly illegal under federal FLSA laws but it’s also bad for morale. Second, who wants to eat pizza at 9:30 at night? Maybe enticing employees to start work with pizza would have been preferable; however, we can’t express enough how illegal this is!
For those of you, who are new to HR, here’s a little refresher on overtime under the FLSA:
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires enterprises engaged in interstate or foreign commerce and state and local governments to pay overtime of 11/2 times an employee’s regular rate of pay for hours worked in excess of 40 hours in a workweek. There are several overtime pay requirements outlined by the FLSA and its regulations, such as properly calculating a workweek, when to pay overtime, what notices an employer must post in the workplace, the fact that the right to overtime protection may not be waived by an employee, and properly calculating employees’ regular rates of pay. Certain executives, professional administrative, computer professionals, outside sales, and highly compensated employees (HCEs) may be exempt from the overtime rules (source: HR.BLR.com®).
Australian Allied Workers Association (SDA) State Secretary Peter O’Keeffe says, “As soon as [the manager] put that notice on the notice board SDA members started ringing us and we immediately got in contact with the manager and told him this was unacceptable and it would not be allowed.”
“We also raised it with Coles head office, because this is clearly very concerning. Coles at the senior level are aghast that he actually took this step and they have taken steps to make sure not only that it doesn’t proceed but that it doesn’t happen again,” O’Keeffe added.
U.S. employers: Let this be a lesson! You must pay your workers overtime for all hours worked over 40 hours; offering them free pizza to get the job done should be an added bonus for those employees and may entice them to actually work that little extra.