Bill Schurgin and Camille Olson Quoted in Employer’s Guide to the FLSA

In the August 2005 issue of Thomson's Employer's Guide to the Fair Labor Standards Act, Camille and Bill are extensively quoted in the article "Attorneys Discuss Key FLSA Exemption Rule Issues." A few of their points are noted here:

"When Camille Olson, an attorney discussing the U.S. Department' of Labor's (DOL) revised "white-collar" exemption rules recently, she asked a large group of HR managers how many had conducted audits of their workers to determine which were now eligible for overtime pay under the new rules, about three-quarters of them raised their hands. Among those who said they had conducted exemption classification audits based on DOL's new regulations; a vast majority also said they had moved more employees from exempt to nonexempt status under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) than vice versa. This means that more of their employees are now entitled to overtime pay than had been eligible to receive it before.

"That's pretty consistent with [our] . . . and the rest of our attorneys' experience at the firms in terms of working with companies across the country," Olson, an attorney with Seyfarth Shaw of Chicago, told attendees of the Society for Human Resource Management annual conference in San Diego June 21 … along with fellow presenter William Schurgin, also an attorney with Seyfarth Shaw.

"Olson and Schurgin, like many employment law attorneys and human resource consultants in the wake of last year's changes, are encouraging employers to err on the side of caution by classifying employees as non-exempt in situations where doubts exist as to whether the employees qualify for an FLSA exemption. Under the FLSA, employers have the burden of proving an employee's exempt status.

In their discussion of the FLSA exemption provisions, they "stressed that job descriptions are not as important as what duties an employee performs and what duties an employer can prove through its records. . . . Job duties that employees must meet in order to be covered by the learned professional exemption can vary based on occupation and even the state in which a worker is employed, Olson and Schurgin said."