Wage & Hour Attorney

The agreement between an employee and a company is simple: the employee comes to work and gets paid for his/her efforts. It may sound easy enough, but that’s not always the case. More often than you would think, employers try to cheat their employees out of the wages that they earned.

Massachusetts has some of the most employee-friendly wage and hour laws in the country. The law was drafted to make sure that employees aren’t taken advantage of. If you work all week, you should be paid on time without having to jump through any additional hoops. To ensure that happens, the law makes it very costly for an employer to not pay its employees. The two most important parts of the law are as follows:

Treble Damages: If your job doesn’t pay you and you end up going to court, the law requires your job to not only pay the unpaid wages, but also treble damages. This means that whatever wages are owed, your employer will have to pay you three times that amount!

Attorneys Fees: If your boss stiffs you for $100, you might think that there’s no way for you to get that money. With lawyers costing hundreds of dollars per hour, who will take a case over $100? That’s not the case for wage and hour cases. The law states that if you’re successful in proving your case, your employer will have to pay your attorney’s fees. This is true even if the fees are more than what you’re owed. This is why lawyers are able to take these cases and know that they will be able to get paid.

There are many ways that disputes arise regarding wages. These include:

Minimum Wage Violations: There are both federal and state requirements regarding the Minimum Wage. In Massachusetts, the state minimum wage is much higher than the federal requirements. It also has been increasing over time, ending up at $15 in 2023. This creates situations where companies do not increase their workers wages to satisfy the minimum wage laws. At the same time, minimum wage violations often arise when a company requires an employee to work additional time “off the clock.”

Unpaid Overtime: In Massachusetts, most employers are required to pay their employees overtime when they work more than 40 hours in a week. This normally means that employees will earn 1.5x their normal wages for these additional hours. Many wage and hour cases from employers who refuse to pay the higher hourly wage for overtime.

Unpaid Commission: Employees who are paid on commission sometimes work for weeks or months on the promise that they’ll be paid when the deal closes. Disputes arise when an employee works on a job and then separates from employment before the deal is done.

Tipped Workers: Most restaurant workers earn the majority of their money from tips. When this is the case, employers are allowed to pay a reduced, tipped minimum wage. However, disputes often arise when tips are split among employees, including workers who might not be entitled to a share of the tips.

If your company isn’t paying your wages, you need to hire experienced litigators that will put you on a level playing field. At Marcotte Law Firm, our lawyers have litigated unpaid wage claims representing both employees and employers. We use that experience to aggressively pursue these claims for our clients. At the same time, we understand how to leverage the facts of the case to find solutions for our clients. While we’re tenacious, we also know when settling might be in our clients’ best interest.

Call or email us for your free, no obligation consultation.