In my experience, wage and hour issues are often misunderstood by employers. Employers often treat employees as "exempt" in order to avoid paying the overtime owed to "non-exempt" employees. As a plaintiff’s attorney said in one of my previous blog posts on the subject:

"I can hit a company with a hundred sexual harassment lawsuits, and it will not inflict anywhere near the damage that [a wage and hour suit] will."

A post from the California Injury Attorneys Blog discusses a recent settlement in which Oracle ageed to pay $35 million for employee wage and hour misclassification. As discussed in the post wage and hour misclassification cases often are class actions which result in large sums paid by Defendant employers.

For more information see my tips for avoiding wage and hour lawsuits.