Large, mid-size and small companies alike are increasingly turning to independent contractors to replace their employees.\u00a0 According to the Wall Street Journal in a September 14, 2017 article entitled The Second Class Office Workers<\/i>, \u201c[m]illions of contractors now do heavy lifting, paper pushing and other jobs for American companies that have replaced employees with outside workers.\u201d\u00a0 The Journal also reported that \u201c[w]ithin the next four years, nearly half of the private-sector workforce in the U.S. will have spent at least some time as a contractor, temporary employee or other type of outside job.\u201d\u00a0 This trend is gaining momentum because companies are attempting to\u00a0avoid paying worker\u2019s compensation insurance, benefits such as retirement and health insurance, payroll taxes, Obamacare taxes and other state and local taxes.\u00a0 It is also being used by companies to avoid paying their workers overtime.<\/p>\n
However, this practice is often a violation of federal law.\u00a0 The Fair Labor Standards Act requires most employees to be paid overtime for each hour worked above forty in a given week.\u00a0 And just because a worker is labeled as an independent contractor does not mean that the worker necessarily is one.\u00a0 The issue is whether the worker is truly a bona fide independent contractor – if so, the company can rightfully deny the worker overtime pay, but if not, the worker (assuming he or she does not otherwise meet any of the narrowly-construed exemptions to overtime pay under the FLSA) is entitled to overtime pay.\u00a0 The Department of Labor identifies six factors in assessing whether a worker is truly an independent contractor:<\/p>\n
None of these factors is singularly determinative, but as a general matter, if the worker is told by the company where to go for work, when to go to work, what assignments to perform, and how to perform them, the worker will generally not be found to be an independent contractor, and thus may have a claim for unpaid overtime.<\/p>\n
It is this author\u2019s experience that the oil and gas industry is following the general trend and increasingly using independent contractors in an effort to avoid paying overtime to its workers.\u00a0 If you or a family member or friend has been classified as an independent contractor in the past three years and denied overtime pay, consider speaking with an experienced overtime attorney.\u00a0 Josh Borsellino is an overtime attorney licensed in Texas that represents workers who have been misclassified as independent contractors.\u00a0 Josh fights for the rights of workers that have been denied overtime pay.\u00a0 Josh accepts overtime cases on a contingency basis, meaning that he only gets paid if money is recovered from the company being sued.\u00a0 Josh provides free consultations for anyone with questions about overtime pay.\u00a0 He may be reached through his online contact form<\/a> or at 817.908.9861.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Large, mid-size and small companies alike are increasingly turning to independent contractors to replace their employees.\u00a0 According to the Wall Street Journal in a September 14, 2017 article entitled The Second Class Office Workers, \u201c[m]illions of contractors now do heavy lifting, paper pushing and other jobs for American companies that have replaced employees with outside…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3886,3895,3897],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfwcounsel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}