 Be mindful of everyone's time. My name is Aisha Driggers. I'm with the City of Columbia Office of Business Opportunities. Thank you for joining us today to discuss understanding the Fair Labor Standards Act and the requirements of our small business owner. I want to start by just going through a couple of housekeeping items. Please keep your phone on mute until we get to our question and answer period towards the end of the presentation. Also, I just want to introduce some of our staff members that are on the phone. We have, and I'll go through them as I go through this slide that I have up right now. One of our program areas in our office is our commercial lending. That is our loan officer's Brett Whiting. He's on the call today. So if you have any questions about the program areas, he'll be able to help you with that. We offer financial assistance to start-up and existing businesses to help with growth expansion, retention, and the creation of new jobs. We also offer assistance in the redevelopment of the commercial corridors. Our support staff helps Brett within that area. That's Tanya Porta DeBerry, Carla Eichelberger, and La Petra Collins. Next, we have our contractor and supplier diversity areas. They offer training and support for our city initiatives designed to increase our local contractor's capacity to compete for government contracts and other procurement opportunities. I'm pleased to see a lot of familiar names that are involved in our contractor and supplier diversity programs. And those programs include our subcontractor outreach, mentor protege, our local business enterprise preference policy, and the Columbia Disadventures Business Prize. The Compliance Administrator in that area is Juliette Nellie. And also we have La Tanya Germany on the call as well. Lastly, we have our technical assistance education and advocacy, which offers business development assistance and courses for start-ups and existing businesses that are looking to grow and expand. Topics that we cover are ones such as this, those topics that are important to the small business owners such as the Fair Labor Standards Act. But we also have topics that include marketing, the use of social media, business plan development, finances, legal issues, and more. And that's the area I'm primarily responsible for. We also have Trevon on the call. He's our fellowship that's been helping us, our fellow that's been helping us this summer in that program area. Our director for those of you don't know is Melissa Lindler. She steers the ship of our department. So I want to go over some of our upcoming webinars that we have. In July, we're going to offer the artist entrepreneur how to monetize your art and creative skills with Kasey Whitner. She's the president of Eclipson Road Creative. So if you have any artists that you know, we want to make sure they understand that they are also a small business and we want to help them strengthen their business model. Next, we'll have a profit first with Stephen Hughes. He's executive director of No Money Inc. And he's talking about changing the mindset of profitability when you look at your business structure and we'll have that at the end of July. We've also scheduled some webinars in August. We'll offer a three-part financial series with Paul Smith. He's the CEO of Best Carolina LLC. He will talk about topics such as the six seas of credit, cash flow projections, and some of the soft skills needed as a small business owner. If you're interested in attending in any of these webinars, I encourage you to contact our office. We'll also share them on social media. And if you don't receive our newsletter, please send us an email and we'll be happy to get you added to our contact list for our newsletter that goes out every Friday. Here's our contact information. Currently, our offices are still close to the public. That might change within the next coming weeks, but you can absolutely call our office at 803-545-3950 and get in contact with us and we'll connect you with the appropriate staff member. You can also send us an email at obio at columbiasc.gov and we will get back with you quickly. Now I would like to introduce Carmen Rodriguez. She's the community outreach and resource planning specialist for the U.S. Department of Labor in the South Carolina district. And she will be discussing Fair Labor Standards Act and the investigative process. Thank you, Aisha, and thank you for inviting me. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to join us today. I'm delighted to be here. My name is Carmen Rodriguez. My dream with the Department of Labor started 24 years ago as an investigator in the Tampa district office. Today, I'm serving as the community outreach and resource planning specialist, but that is a very short term for me because actually this Friday is my last day as the community outreach. After that, Colin Trimble will be back and I believe that Aisha, you dealt with Colin before and he will definitely be available to do these type of presentations and to answer any questions. So you guys are still gonna be in very good hands. So today we're gonna be talking about the Fair Labor Standards Act and the investigative process. The wage in our division enforces several labor laws, such as the Davis-Bacon Act, which has to do with government contracts, the Service Contract Act, the Family Medical Leave Act. We also have laws that protect the migrants and the foreign workers that come to work in agriculture and other establishments as well. But the bulk of our investigations are under the Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA for short. The FLSA covers minimum wage, overtime, child labor and record keeping. So we're gonna be talking a little bit about everything but the main thing that I wanna discuss with you is what the investigative process is. I don't know, maybe some of you have already gone through one and maybe all of you are crossing your fingers. I hope that it never happens but if you do get a visit or a call from us, I want you to understand what the process is gonna be and I want you to know that this can be a very friendly process. There really is no reason for it not to be. So it might be a little intimidating when somebody from the government calls you and it says I need to go and look at your records and things like that but in reality, it should be friendly, it should be okay and you guys can work with that person and things will go out very smoothly. So the first thing that I wanna discuss with you is how we go out and to do investigations. So we get investigations initiated because of complaints and it could be a current employee, it could be a former employee or sometimes even competition. There could be an employer that hire somebody or has hired several people from company X and those people tell them how things are done there and they're like, you know what, that's not right. So they may call us and say, you know, I've had several people working for this other company, this is how they're doing it and we can initiate an investigation that way. The other way would be because we do directed work. So every single year, the agency as a whole establishes several initiatives that we want to look at. We decide on those initiatives because perhaps we have heard a lot of complaints about that type of industry. We've done a lot of investigation in those type of industries and we wanna make sure that we make an impact and perhaps change the practices for the industry as a whole. And then the third reason why we can come out to do an investigation is because it's completely random. It could be that we don't have a lot of complaints in our files and we probably have done all of our initiatives and our supervisor can say, you know what, then you can take X-Rode and you can do whichever investigation you want if you don't just visit any company that you want. Because of the Freedom of Information Act, we could not disclose to the employer why we are out there. However, once the file is done and it's concluded, the employer has the right to request information about their investigation under the Freedom of Information Act. That is something that has to be done in writing. It goes to our supervisor and then it gets moved up to the region and we start getting everything prepared to give you the information. So pre-COVID, all of our investigations were done face to face. For every investigation, there was going to be at least one establishment visit. Nowadays, we're doing everything remotely, but the process has not changed. Well, with the exception of the fact that maybe now you don't have somebody just dropping in and walking in and say, hey, this is who I am and I need to do an investigation and I need to speak to somebody. But for the most part, everything has remained the same. So once an investigator gets assigned a file or a case, the investigator will contact the employer. And again, with what I just said a few seconds ago, sometimes they can just drop in and walk in and start the investigation that way. But sometimes they just call or perhaps send a letter with an appointment letter saying I'd like to visit your establishment on this date and at this time and then provide them with a list of documents that we eventually are going to need. That list can be overwhelming because there's a lot of details on that list. But first of all, there's a lot of things that may not pertain to the business that you own. And there's other things that we may not need to get to. For example, our statute of limitations is two years. So when we request records, we're gonna request on that letter, it's gonna say that we need two years worth of records. And that can be overwhelming for someone depending on how their record keeping method is. It could take a long time for them to go through all the records and pull them out. But sometimes they can be all in a binder and they just give us a binder. Here you go, the two years. So don't feel overwhelmed by it. If it's gonna take you a little bit more time to get it, we will work with you. The investigator will give you some time to do that. Perhaps you can provide, I can probably give you six months right now and then work on getting the other thing. And the investigator will work with you because we're only human, we're not gonna be able to go through two years worth of records in one day or in a few hours. So the investigator will work with you. We're gonna be requesting documents like for example, tax documents, the first page of the tax return form. That is another one that sometimes people are hesitant and like, why do you wanna look at this? Well, that is very, very important for the investigation. And the reason why is because of jurisdiction or coverage. And not all companies are gonna be subject to the provisions of the act. There's two ways that we have jurisdiction over a company. The first one is called enterprise coverage. And when we established that a company is covered or we have jurisdiction under enterprise coverage, what that means is that everybody in that company is subject to the provisions of the act, minimum wage, overtime, child labor, record keeping. And that happens when an employer grosses at least $500,000 a year. And this is gross revenue. So that's why we ask for the first page of the tax return form, because on the first line in the tax return is the gross revenue. So that's the reason why we ask for that. And that is vital for the company that perhaps does not gross the 500,000 because they need to show us that they're not grossing the 500,000. So when we have a company that does not gross $500,000 a year, we look at individual coverage. So what that means is that there could be a company that has some employees covered and some employees that are not covered. And I'll give you some examples of that. Any person that is engaged in interstate commerce, making phone calls, mailing things out of state. And when I say making phone calls is out of state, faxing out of state, receiving things that come from out of state for them to process. Nowadays, it's very easy with the internet. If they're using the internet on a daily basis, then the internet is gonna be enough because it's crossing state lines. And individual coverage is done on a week to week basis. So there could be somebody that may come in and out of coverage. In a restaurant, for example, it is very common that when we do not have the 500,000 that we see that the servers are covered. And that is because for the most part, a lot of servers are the ones that actually process the credit card payments. And when they swipe that credit card, there's a phone call that gets generated. And a lot of times that phone call goes out of state. So when an investigation starts and we see something like that, we're gonna ask information about your credit card machine and your merchants that is providing you the service. So we're going to be calling them and asking, okay, what is the phone number that the call gets generated to? And where is it? Where are your banks and things like that? So if it's out of state, then we're gonna have coverage for those people. So in a restaurant, you may have like the front of the house servers covered, but then the back of the house, the kitchen staff, they may not be covered. So that is the reason why we ask for those information. We're gonna be asking for time and payroll records. We're going to be contacting employees and asking them about how things are done in the company. If you have any miners employed, we're definitely going to want to talk to those miners because we wanna make sure that all the child labor laws are taken care of. All right, so we started the investigation. We started the process. The first thing that happens is what we call the initial conference. We have the initial conference with either the owner of the company or the general manager, somebody that can give us information about the company. During this initial conference, we want to learn about the company. We wanna know who the officers are, what their work week is, how often do they pay if they have other locations, number of employees, when is payday, how is overtime paid, how are the records kept, what type of method do they use for record keeping and who they claim as exempt. And any deductions like we're gonna be asking, do you make any deductions other than the regular taxes and FICA and Medicare and all of those things, what type of deductions do you make from people's paycheck? If they use a payroll company, we wanna know which is the payroll company that does their payroll. And again, we're gonna be asking a lot about child labor. So we're gonna ask the employer about the child labor and if they have any miners, we're gonna be asking what type of work those miners do so that we can just learn in that first step what the company is about. The second part that we're gonna do is the employee interviews. We talk to employees, we talk to current employees and we talk to former employees and we talk to them confidentially. So we're never going to tell the employer who said what. So we're gonna ask questions and they're very basic questions that the employers already know the answers to because it's the way that they do business. We wanna know what their day is like and we wanna know what their duties are so that we can establish if there's any exemptions or whatnot. So under the Fair Labor Standards Act, minimum wage, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and we wanna make sure that everybody's paid at least the $7.25 an hour. And then overtime has to be paid after 40 hours and one work week. And we're gonna be looking at that as well. I'm gonna take some time to explain sometimes that an employee can be paid an hourly rate and then maybe they get a commission or they get paid a bonus. Not all bonuses have to be included at the regular rate for the overtake purposes but most of them are. Let me first say the ones that are excluded. Any discretionary bonuses that the employer complete discretion of the employer to pay. The employer can change their mind at the end and not pay it. However, any bonus that the employee is working for, for example, production bonus, if the employee has a quota and the employee knows if I meet my quota I am getting a bonus, then that is not a discretionary bonus and that bonus needs to be included for the overtime purposes. So when these things happen, let's say that somebody's paid on an hourly rate, let's say $10 an hour, which the over 10 rate would be 15. But if they get a bonus on any particular week, then we have to add that into the regular rate for the overtake purposes. So in that case, you would do all hours worked at the regular rate. So at $10 in this case, and then you add the bonus and now you have the total gross and you divide the total hours work until the total gross and that's gonna give you the regular rate for all hours worked. And then to calculate the additional overtime, it would be the additional half time. So half of that regular rate because the regular rate covers all hours. So that's all the time. So only half is due for overtime. And I know that that without looking at your faces and seeing if there's any glare or confusion, I wish I could be there. So that I could just say, okay, let's go into it more. But please, if you have more questions about this, don't hesitate to ask them at the end. I do want to make sure that you guys understand that. So basically to get regular rate, you're gonna add all earnings, all gross earnings, add them together and you're going to divide all hours worked into the total gross earnings. That gives you the regular rate of pay for all hours, straight time for all hours. And half of that rate is gonna be due for overtime. Okay, I hope that you guys got it. All right, so we're gonna be talking to the employees and getting all this information and it's kept confidential. And it's very possible that we're gonna be contacting people that used to work there that they're not there anymore. And we're gonna ask the same questions. And once we're done with that, the interviewing process, that is when we're gonna be saying, okay, now I'm ready for the records. And there could be an investigator that perhaps wants to look at some of the records upfront. Some of them wait for them after the interviews. And the reason is because there may be things that the records are not gonna show and people are gonna tell us. And then if people tell us some things and then the records are showing it, then I'm gonna have to go back and re-look at those records and perhaps make some notes. So we're gonna review the records. We're gonna get time records, payroll records, and basically compare one to the other. Make sure that they're coincide with each other. We're gonna make sure that if there's any deductions other than the regular deductions that employees do not fall under minimum wage and that everybody's getting paid at least at least a minimum wage. And then we're gonna be looking at the overtime. Once we're done with that, let's say that we do find that there is a violation. Let's say that an employer instead of paying time and a half after 40 hours, they pay straight time. So we're gonna have to compute the additional halftime that is due. We're gonna make the computations. And then at the end, we're gonna have what we call the final conference with the employer. During the final conference, we're going to discuss the findings of the investigation. We're going to discuss the reason why it is a violation. And the first thing that we're gonna ask the employer is how do you think that, what can you do to comply, to come into compliance? Because at the end of the day, the mission of the wage in our division is to have employers in compliance in addition to have employees be paid their fair wage for the hours that they work. So we're gonna talk about compliance before we even tell the employer how much money it is that they're gonna be owed due to the employees. We're gonna discuss the compliance. And once we have that agreement that the employer agrees to comply, then we'll present them with, okay, this is what the back wages would be. And then we discuss, when can this be paid? And there used to be a time that we investigators could have more time to provide the employers to pay the back wages. Nowadays, they want everything being paid within 30 days, usually almost immediately, but if it's within 30 days, it's okay. If an employer needs more time and they think that they have the inability to pay, it's possible that we're gonna have to get a lot of financial documents. We send it to our forensic accountant and the forensic accountant evaluates that and then determines if the employer does need more time or not. If more time is granted, or perhaps we do an installment agreement, then there's gonna be interest included in that. So sometimes it could turn into a lot more. One thing that it's very important to mention is that there is something called liquidated damages. Liquidated damages are paid to the employee. If we find that the employer perhaps did not have a good faith reason for the violation, it's very possible that we will assess liquidated damages and they're gonna be equal to the amount of the back wages. So if an employee is due $1,000, now that employee is due $2,000. So that is something that I definitely want everybody to understand because it is possible. As far as civil money penalties are concerned, the civil money penalties are not paid to the employee, it goes to the department and that it depends on all the circumstances in the investigation. For the most part, first time investigations, we do not assess civil money penalties, but it depends on the circumstances. If we, for instance, go into an establishment and we find that all the records were falsified, then we may assess the civil money penalty even if it was the first time investigation. So those are the things that you need to keep in mind that you may have to pay liquidated damages and there's always the possibility of civil money penalties, okay? All right, so one thing that I also want to discuss, there's two things that I wanna discuss with you. I wanna talk a little bit about exemptions and I wanna talk about child labor. So let me start with the child labor. Miners as young as 14 are allowed to work. However, there are some restrictions for all minors, but for 14 and 15 year olds, there are hours restrictions under regulation number three of the Fair Labor Standards Act. So 14 and 15 year olds can only work after 7 a.m. and no later than 7 p.m. when school is in session. During the summer, which we actually establish at a June 1st through Labor Day, they can work out until 9 p.m. However, when school is in session, they can only work three hours on a weekday and that includes Friday, even though they don't go to school on Saturday. On Friday nights, they can only work three hours. On Saturdays and Sundays, they can work up to eight hours. When school is in session, they can only work 18 hours a week. Now when school is not in session, they can work 40 hours a week. The public school system is the one that's going to determine when school is in session. During the pandemic, when the pandemic started, that all the kids were doing school from home, doing distance learning, sorry, not just homeschooling, but they were doing the distance learning. A lot of kids found themselves with a lot of time because if they can hustle and get work done, they were done and they were getting jobs. And we have found a lot of violations with 14 and 15 year olds because they were working while school was in session. So even though they may be done with work, if the public school system is open and the school is in session, they can not work during those school hours, okay? Now the other thing is that for all minors, there are hazardous occupations and we call those HOs. So there's seven HOs, 17, I'm sorry, that minors work that minors cannot perform of any age. And just to give you some examples of those, it's like driving, they cannot drive. They cannot use meat slicers, they cannot work in baking. They cannot use like dough mixers. Paper balers is one that we see a lot, a lot of times in like malls. Minors are working in all the different retail stores, but then there are supervisors like, okay, can you take the boxes to the paper baler? And if that paper baler is an automatic one where the key is kept in there and anybody can just press the button or turn the key, press the button and it's operating, if a minor of any age does that, that is a violation. Because and the most important thing about the child labor laws is number one is that with every child labor violation, there are going to be civil money penalties no matter what. That's number one, but the most important one is that we wanna keep the children safe. We want the kids to be able to go to work in a safe environment where there will be and educational opportunities come first, okay? So other examples of hazardous occupations is roofing. No miners can work in the roofing industry. Forklifts, they cannot operate a forklift. Woodworking machines, circular saws. And the thing with these power drill machines is not only they're not allowed to operate them, but they can't even clean them. Very recently, we've heard about a case where a miner was actually just simply cleaning a meat slicer and somehow with his probably elbow or something, the machine went on and cut his finger. So they're not even allowed to touch the machines at all. So any power drill machines are out of the questions for miners. Later today, I'm gonna be sending Aisha some links to fact sheets that she can share with everybody. The other thing that I wanted to talk about was the different exemptions that there are. So employees are entitled to time and a half after 40 hours, but we have some people that are going to be exempt from that. The first exemption that I wanna talk about is the executive exemption, which is where all our supervisors and our managers will fall under. But in order for that exemption to be applicable to any person, and it's important to mention that titles do not make exemptions, duties do. Anybody can be called a manager or a director or supervisor, but if their duties do not coincide with that title, then the exemption is not gonna be applicable and they're gonna be non-exempt. There's a big misconception where we see that people think, if I pay a salary, then it means that I don't have to pay overtime, but that is not true. If an employee is non-exempt, you can pay a salary, you can pay a salary to anybody, but the thing is that if they're non-exempt, they're still entitled to overtime. And the way to calculate that overtime is the same way that I explained earlier, which is the salary, you divide the hours into a salary, it gives you the regular rate and half of that is for overtime. And that's what we call a fluctuating workweek because every week it's gonna change. All right, so going back to the executive exemption, the first thing is that they have to supervise at least two or more people, full-time people, or it's equivalent. It could be one full-time, two part-time people or four part-time people, but they have to be supervising, directly supervising those two employees. They have to have the authority to hire and fire or at least make recommendation for hiring and firing. For example, they have their superior and they go to their superior and says, so-and-so is not working out. I've been having conversations with him or her and things are not getting any better. Today, he or she made this big mistake. I think that we should consider termination. And if they're superior, it's like, you know what? I take your information, value your information, and then that person gets terminated, then their recommendation was the one that led to the termination. And the same thing goes with hiring. If they are involved in the interviewing process and then they give their opinion, like, okay, I think this person would be a very good fit for our department or our agency or company, and they hire that person, then they are recommending for hiring. So we have supervising two or more employees, hiring and firing or making recommendations. The third one is that supervision or managerial duties must be their primary duty. So they have to be hired for that or promoted for that. What we find a lot is that sometimes people are, maybe team leads, for example, and they're doing the same work as everybody, like let's take it for example, in a landscaping business, they are in charge of a crew per se, but they're actually cutting grass just like everybody else. So their primary duty is to cut grass, not to supervise the people. So that is the other one that they need to supervision must be their primary duty. The last duty test for this is that the salary requirement must be at least $684 a week. Up until 2020, that requirement was only $455 a week, but the salary requirement went up and it's $684 a week. So in order for somebody to qualify for that exemption, all those things need to apply. The other exemption that I wanted to talk about is the administrative exemption. That one is one that is for people that can have independent judgment and discretion over the company. Whatever decisions they make can affect the company directly. So somebody that perhaps they can bind the company financially can qualify for that exemption. Somebody that can make changes to the policy of the company may qualify for that exemption. So that one's a little bit harder, but there's a lot of people that would fall under that. Then we have our professional exemption. The professional exemption requires a higher education, at least a four-year degree in the field, in a field of science and learning. So when we have people that are classified as professionals, we're gonna ask them about their education. We wanna know, do you have a four-year degree? And sometimes people have a lot of experience, but maybe they have only a two-year degree, and then the exemption will not be applicable. There's other exemptions. There's like, for instance, the outside salesman exemption, that is a minimum wage and an overtime exemption, and that if people are going outside of the employer's business to get sales and promote the company and try to get more business for the company, then they could be exempt, but they cannot do it in sight. They cannot be on the phone or on the computer trying to get more business for the employer. They have to be outside of the establishment. All right, so we've discussed minimum wage and overtime and child labor record keeping. Let's talk about record keeping. Record keeping are gonna be your best friend. Why? Because today can be the best employer anybody has ever worked for. My daughter was sick and he told me to take off and just take care of my daughter, and he still paid me for that week. But tomorrow, that person can make a big mistake. You don't have any other choice other than to terminate that person, and you're the worst employer they ever worked for. And they're gonna be saying, they didn't pay me right. They, I worked a lot of overtime and they didn't pay me the time and a half. And when we come out to do an investigation, we're gonna ask for those records. And because record keeping is part of a Fair Labor Standards Act, it is the employer's responsibility to keep records. Therefore, if the records do not exist, we are going to go with what employees are saying. So when we're in that process of doing the employee interviews, we're gonna be asking an average number of hours that they work. And at the end, we're gonna average everything up. And if the average comes up to 50 hours a week, that's what we're gonna use across the board for everybody when we do not have records. So the records are your best friend. They are the way, it's the way that you're gonna be able to defend yourself. So it's very important that you keep records, okay? All right, I think that we are ready for questions. So if anybody has questions. Thank you, Carmen. That's been some information. I have a page full of notes already. So at this point, if anyone has any questions, they can either type it in their chat or they can unmute themselves. Hi, Aisha, this is Melissa. I just wanted to tell everyone, thank you so much for being a part of this event. My name is Melissa Lindler. I'm the director for the Office of Business Opportunities and I definitely wanna thank Department of Labor for participating in this and being such a great partner in helping our small businesses understand the rules and regulations surrounding labor. So thank you and thank you, Aisha, for doing this workshop. I learned a lot. This is great. This is very great. Thank you. Thank you, Melissa. I know we have some construction companies on here and engineering firms. So I'm sure that this information has been valuable to them. If they have any questions, please let us know. And I wrote my questions down, but then you answered them as soon as I wrote them down. So that was great. I had questions about the records that are required and then any penalties. So you definitely covered all of that information and it's good to know about all the child labor requirements and making sure that they stay in compliance. I am curious if there is a frequent violation that you see. I know you mentioned during the pandemic you've seen some child labor violations, but are there any other ones that at a high level that you see often? So maybe our small businesses can be aware of those. Record keeping is one of the biggest one that we find. We find a lot of overtime violations because employers maybe pay straight time for all hours worked rather than paying the time and a half. We find a lot of misclassification of people that are classified as exempt and then they're not exempt. Another big one that we find is misclassification of independent contractors. That is a very, very big one. A lot of people, companies say, okay, so I'm gonna pay everybody with a 10.99 and that's okay, but we have to know, is this your employer or is this an independent contractor? So an independent contractor basically is somebody that has their own company, somebody that bids for jobs, somebody that will come out and say, okay, I can do this work for you, but this is how much I'm gonna charge you and they can set their own times when they're gonna work and whatnot. But we find that there's companies that classify everybody as independent contractors, but in reality they are their employees. They're like, for instance, if a company is a security guard company, the company is a security guard company, but then they hire all of these independent contractors to be security guards. Well, if the primary business of this company is to be security guards, then those security guards are your employees. You're hiring them to be your employees because for the most part, there's gonna be a permanency in the relationship. So that's what we're looking for, the relationship between the employer and the employee. If there's an employment relationship, then they are going to be employees and not independent contractors. And then with that, we see that we don't have record of hours worked. We see that they don't get paid over time. A lot of times we find minimum wage violations in companies where they are deducting for certain things. And actually, let me mention this one. In a restaurant, servers, tipped employees, all tipped employees are minimum wage employees. Regardless of how much money they make at the end of the week on an hourly basis, they are all minimum wage employees. The department has an agreement and allows the employers to take what we call the TIP credit. So for the employer to take a TIP credit, the employer pays a smaller cash wage and it's 213 is the minimum that they can pay. And then the $5 and 12 cents, which is the difference between 725 and the 213 is what we call the TIP credit. So the employer is only paying a very small amount. So all the tips belong to the employee. And if the employer makes any deduction to a tipped employee, there's immediately a minimum wage employee because it's gonna be reducing them under minimum wage. Typical violations that we find is deductions for walkouts, for shortages, for items that break, uniform deductions. If an employer has a shirt that has the company logo on it, the employer cannot charge the employee for it. The employer has to provide at least a reasonable amount and that it's gonna be depending on how often this person's gonna work. If it's a part-time employee that may only work three days a week, then maybe one is sufficient as it was reasonable. But if it's somebody that's gonna work five or six days a week, then they probably need more than one shirt so that they can work throughout the week. And then those need to be replaced eventually, like if a year later they're still working and they're still using the same shirt and maybe it's time for a new one. So, but that's only when the uniform is not streetwear. So if the uniform is you can wear any black shirt and any black pants and any black shoes, then they can go to any store and buy it and that's streetwear and it would be okay like that. But on the other hand, if you have an employer that says, well now you need to go like a tux shirt and a bow tie, that's not streetwear. And if the employee has to go out and shop for that and buy it, that is also a violation, a minimum wage violation for a uniform deduction. Even though the employee paid for it out of their pocket, we will still see it as a deduction. Thank you, that's helpful. And the part that you explained about how it could be an individual coverage in a restaurant, how the servers may be covered, but then maybe the kitchen staff, I think that's important to know that it's not a blanket coverage depending on the type of work the employee's doing. So, correct, that's helpful. All right. Do you have any final words? I don't see any questions in the chat. Okay, no, we have a phone number that is for employers and employees alike because if an employer does not know if what they're doing or planning to do is correct, they can still call us. That number is 866 for US wage or 866-487-9243. And then our website also has a lot of information. And actually there's one that it's called employer.gov, GOP. So employer.gov, employers can go in there and find a lot of answers to their questions. There's fact sheets and then for their employees, if a worker is not sure that what the employer's doing is correct or not and the employer's like, well, you know what, I did my research and I know it's correct, then employees can go to worker.gov and get information there as well. And then our general website, www.dol.gov, GOP, backslash agencies, backslash WHD for wage hour division is another place where there's tons of resources. We have resources in multiple languages. So if an employer has employees that perhaps speak Spanish and they'd like to provide them with information in Spanish, it's in there. Another important thing to know is that another requirement under record keeping is that employers must post the minimum wage poster. It has to be posted somewhere in the establishment, somewhere where employees can see it. So if there is, they can go to our website and actually download one on an eight by 10 format or an eight by 11. And they can always call our office and we can mail them one as well. So there's a lot of resources on our website for both employers and employees. All right, that's great. And Carmen, I certainly will miss seeing you. We've been on several partner calls and you always seem so passionate about making sure that the employers are not intimidated by the investigative process and we appreciate that and the fact that you're a resource for us so that our small businesses can work on the front end to make sure that they are prepared. Like you mentioned several times, record keeping is their best friend. So that's really important. I think that's a great takeaway to make sure that you have adequate record keeping and that you're not afraid to contact DOL if you have questions to make sure that you are in compliance. You did mention that you would see me. With that Aisha, let me just also say if you call our office to ask questions and you tell us, look, this is what I did and we tell you, well, it's not correct. We're not gonna come back and say, well, there we go. We have an investigation that we can do. No, we want to get you into compliance and then employers can make their decision if they wanna correct the issue but we're not going to go to do investigations because an employer actually reached out to get help from us. That's great, that's great. So the individuals on the call, if they are in South Carolina, Colin Trimble, which should be their contact. Yes. Okay. And I'll definitely make sure that everyone on the call has his contact information. He's also always been a great partner and resource for us but it's been a pleasure to work with you for the past few months and you did mention that you're gonna provide me with some fact sheets that I can, I will send out in an email along with our survey. We use that survey to determine how well we're doing with these trainings and what additional trainings our small business community needs and we'd be happy to provide those if you just let us know. So if that's it, thank you, Jimmy for saying thank you. It was a good information. We appreciate that. All right, Carmen. So thank you so much everyone. We hope you have a great rest of your day and let us know if we can help you. We have a question. Oh. On fringe benefits. So fringe benefits will take, fringe benefits is only for Davis Bacon act cases and contract cases. And those things are action projects that are done with federal funds. That's what we serve Davis Bacon. The service contract is any service that is provided with the federal government and things like that. So when we have one of those, then there's a wage determination that is attached to that project. And then this is something that the employer will get from the contracting officer. And in the wage determination, there will be the information on each classification of the trade, what the fringe is for each person. There are some trades that do not have any fringe benefits and then there's others that have fringe benefits. Okay, did that answer your question? Make sure that answered their question. All right. All right. Okay, well, let us know if you have any additional questions, you will receive an email from me soon. Yes, that answer your question. Okay. Good deal. All right. Everyone take care. Stay safe. Thank you. Thank you everybody for having a great day. Bye. Bye-bye.