Opinion ID: 660190
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Gateway's Overtime Policy

Text: 19 Gateway pays its reporters a weekly salary. Gateway's official policy is that reporters are not to work more than 40 hours per week. Sometimes, if a reporter needs to work additional hours to complete a story, he or she may get advance approval from Gateway to be paid for the extra work. When reporters need to work more than 40 hours to put out the paper, Gateway tells the reporters to offset any overtime with compensatory time. That is, they are supposed to work fewer hours on other days during the week to reduce their total weekly hours to 40. 4 20 Gateway does pay some money to reporters over and above their salary. The paper awards a $25.00 bonus for extra quality work and occasionally gives extra compensation for especially difficult assignments. And Gateway occasionally pays reporters time-and-a-half for overtime work. 21 The Secretary brought this action because, despite Gateway's official policy, reporters routinely work more than 40 hours per week and Gateway does not pay them for the additional hours that they work. Gateway's unofficial policy is that time slips should not total more than forty hours regardless of how many hours the reporter actually has worked. Gateway editors have told reporters that they would not be paid overtime for working more hours. In some cases, Gateway's editors have even returned time slips totalling more than 40 hours to reporters who had recorded their actual hours, telling the reporters to revise their pay slips to reflect forty hours or find work elsewhere. Knowing about this practice, the reporters themselves often put incorrect totals of hours on their time slips. 22