Even if employees generally are paid overtime, that does not necessarily mean that they are receiving all of the overtime (or regular pay) that they are actually entitled to.
Work Performed “Off-the-Clock”
Many overtime suits involve employees who were paid for some overtime, but at the end of the day they clocked out, kept working and did not receive any compensation for this time.
All employees are absolutely entitled to receive payment for all hours worked. Whether that means hours worked in the office, at your kitchen table at home, while sitting on your couch and watching television in your living room or elsewhere. There are no exceptions to this rule!
It is almost never a valid excuse for an employer to say that they “did not know” an employee was working overtime. If you do something for your employer, whether they know it or not, they have benefited from your work and you deserve to be paid for it.
Sometimes employees think that projects or tasks take them too long to complete, so they do not put some hours down on their time sheet because it “should have” taken them just one hour. However, the law does not care how long it takes you to do a job. If you are doing it, you must be paid for your time, no matter how long you take.
Travel Time
The law generally requires payment of wages to all employees while they are traveling on behalf of their employers. This includes commuting to and from an alternate worksite in a different city and various other types of “travel time”. These hours all count as “hours worked” and must be compensated, just like if you were sitting at your desk back at the office doing paperwork during that time.
Salaried Pay
Under California law, a salaried employee generally must receive a full week of pay for each week in which that employee performs work (any amount of work). Theoretically, an employee needs only to check her e-mail once from home while on vacation to receive a full week of pay under this rule. While the courts might not be quite that generous when it comes to applying this rule, one hour of work has been held to suffice.
Under federal law, this same rule applies, but only on a day-by-day basis. In other words, an employee must usually receive a full day of pay for any day he performs any work.