New York's Spread of Hours Regulations
Bet you never even heard of it! Why? Because it's not found in any New York wage payment law. The regulation applies when an employer pays employees at or near the minimum wage Generally, the rule applies when:
- The employee's spread of hours' exceeds 10 hours (from the start of the day to the end of the day, including meal and break time).
- When the employee works a split shift in the workday with nonconsecutive work hours. Meal periods of one hour or less don't count to interrupt the continuity of the shift.
The employer is obligated to pay one hour of additional pay for each hour in excess of 10 hours and for each split shift. If both situations occur, the employee gets 2 hours additional pay. In other words, if the employee works 11 hours at NY's current minimum wage ($6.00 until January 2006 when it will go up to $6.75), it owes the employee 12 hours of pay. If those 11 hours were the result of a split shift, it would owe the employee 13 hours pay for those hours. These additional hours where the employee did not work are paid at the minimum wage.
So how does the employer get around this? They should pay $6.60/hour if their work schedules would result in the instance where one additional hour would be owed (spread of hours or split shift), or $7.20/hour in the instance where work schedules would result in 2 hours being owed.
For those of you who want to try to figure this out yourself, good luck! I actually can't even provide a link to the regulation as the state doesn't have it online!! But, it can be found here 12 N.Y.C.C.R. Sec. 142-2.4 (if you remember what an actual library is!).