March 09, 2006

The overtime-classification wars have reached Wall Street, with the result that $400,000-a-year stockbrokers are claiming with a straight face that they're really hourly employees, contends Littler Mendelson's Allan G. King:

In a spate of class action lawsuits against Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Prudential and other brokerages, filed principally in New York, securities brokers -- who earned billions in commissions annually -- now claim they were just hourly "wage earners," who were misclassified by their employers to thwart the Fair Labor Standards Act and the California Labor Code.

Could we please, please get Congress to revisit the antediluvian FLSA and start preparing to repeal parts of it that make no sense today, or never made sense in the first place?