A Massachusetts Dealer agreed to pay $450K to settle overtime and minimum wage charges filed by the State Attorney General. Here's a link to the full report -
click here
Here's the excerpt that caught my attention:
Mike Balise explains, "There was a relatively controversial interpretation of the minimum wage laws, where as we were paying bonuses on a monthly basis, the bonuses that you pay monthly only count in the week that you pay them. So we went back voluntarily, recalculated everything, paid employees the difference and reformulated the way in which we pay our commissioned sales people."
As I understand it, a dealer could conceivably have a salesperson who earns $10,000 for the month but they would still be eligible for additional pay because there was a week or two where they didn't make minimum wage. It doesn't matter that the employee may have earned money toward their bonus during those weeks because the bonus only counts for the week it was paid.
I wonder if this interpretation of the Minimum Wage Law is limited to Massachusetts or whether dealers in other states would be vulnerable to a similar suit?