Who is exempt from the wage and hour provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act?
The Fair Labor Standards Act exempts from the wage and hour provisions any employee employed in an executive, administrative, or professional capacity, as well as an employee employed in the capacity of an outside salesman. Can job titles measure whether or not a person is exempt? Job titles are insufficient as yardsticks. The employees for whom exemption is sought under the term “administrative” have extremely diverse functions and a wide variety of titles. A title alone is of little or no assistance in determining the true importance of an employee to the employer or his exempt or nonexempt status. Titles can be had cheaply and are of no determinative value. Thus, while there are supervisors of production control (whose decisions affect the welfare of large numbers of employees) who qualify for exemption under the Act, it is not hard to call a rate setter (whose functions are limited to timing certain operations and jotting down times on a standardized form) a “methods engineer” or a
