We would like to provide you with a basic guide on how to pursue unpaid wages including overtime. This is such an important topic, especially as American employees find themselves trying to stretch every dollar while working multiple jobs. These days, nobody can afford to lose their rightfully-earned money.
You’ll greatly increase your chances of successfully recovering your unpaid wages if you can organize your approach to the fighting case.
Basic Strategy for How to Pursue Unpaid Wages
Follow these steps to handle a potential lost wages situation.
- When you first discover a paycheck discrepancy, you can calmly address it with your immediate supervisor if you feel comfortable doing so. Your supervisor should make sure that the employer immediately pays you any lost wages if they resulted from a clerical or payroll error.
- If this fails and you are comfortable doing so, you can contact other managers in your company’s chain of command or human resources to attempt to resolve your unpaid wages. Again, the company should immediately reimburse you for any lost wages if the company mistakenly failed to pay you all wages you earned.
- If management will not pay you all wages due or you do not feel comfortable talking to management, then you should prepare to file an unpaid wages claim by gathering all pertinent information and contacting an employment attorney.
- Focus your efforts on getting as much information for your attorney as possible. Records like pay stubs, time sheets, job descriptions, and any emails and texts about your job will help your employment attorney best position your case for success.
We cover this strategy even further in this article on how to prepare for a meeting with your employee rights attorney.
Types of Unpaid Wage Violations You Should Know
There are a variety of unpaid wage claims. These include:
- Working overtime but not receiving the time-and-a-half premium.
- Misuse of timecards.
- Job misclassifications such as “assistant managers” and mortgage loan officers.
- Other jobs pay only commission but require regular hourly work.
- Receiving “comp time,” instead of overtime payment at 1 ½ times your regular hourly rate.
- Working off the clock including before and after your shift (examples include answering emails, texts, and phone calls when you are not clocked in).
- Working through paid breaks and unpaid meal periods (this is common in the medical industry).
You talk to an employment attorney if you have experienced any form of unpaid wages.
More About Pursuing Overtime Cases
We emphasize overtime discrepancies so much because this is a very common problem all throughout America. You might be wondering what you can do if you believe you’ve lost overtime pay but no longer have time records or other key evidence. The bottom line is that you do not need records to pursue your overtime case. An employment attorney can explain this to you.
Rowdy Meeks Legal Group LLC: Your Advocate While You Pursue Unpaid Wages
Our law firm is more than happy to help you determine the best course of action for your unpaid wage claim. So, if you’re ready to finally pursue unpaid wages and need help doing it, contact us any time for a free consultation and we will best pursue your case.