An employer asked the DOL about this situation:

Employees are offered an optional training course on a computer application they use to do their work. Everyone is already trained on the basics and has enough skills to perform their duties. But the optional course provides advanced knowledge, which lets them work more efficiently.

The training includes online courses employees are expected to take at home on their own time. Most of the employees taking the course are nonexempt — do they need to be paid for what they do at home?

The DOL’s answer: Yes.

Time spent attending training doesn’t have to be paid if all of these criteria are met:

• the training occurs outside the employee’s normal working hours
• attendance is voluntary
• the information learned is not directly related to an employee’s job, and
• the employee doesn’t do any work during the session.

In this example, the training was directly related to how employees did their jobs — it helped them perform their work more easily — so the time had to be paid.

Getting ready to comply with the COBRA changes included in the stimulus package passed last month? Here’s one online resource you’ll need.

Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), employees involuntarily terminated from September 1, 2008 through December 31, 2009 must pay only 35% of COBRA premiums. The federal government will pay the rest (by asking employers to pay 65% and refunding them with a payroll tax credit).

The subsidies are available for nine months, or until the ex-employee is eligible for coverage from another employer or Medicare.

The ARRA also requires employers to notify current and former plan participates about the subsidy. To help companies comply, the Department of Labor (DOL) has issued four model notices, each tailored to a specific situation:

1. General notice – Must be sent to all qualified beneficiaries who experience a qualifying event during the period from September 1, 2008 through December 31, 2009.
2. Abbreviated general notice – Goes to individuals who experienced a qualifying event on or after September 1, 2008 and currently have COBRA coverage.
3. Alternative notice – For individuals who become eligible for continuation coverage under a state law. This notice is meant to be modified to conform to different states’ requirements.
   
4. Notice in connection with extended election periods – Must be sent to employees who lost their jobs before the ARRA was signed into law and turned down COBRA coverage.

You can download the notices from the DOL’s Web site here.

The Department of Labor (DOL) has created a Web page dedicated to the law’s revisions. It contains fact sheets and Q&As on both military service member leave and the changes made to traditional FMLA leave.

Also, it’s a great place to find required FMLA forms and posters.

You can access the page here.

In one of the biggest settlements of its kind, Virginia-based Globalcynex, Inc. has agreed to pay $1.7 million to 343 employees.

The employees came to the U.S. through the H-1B visa program, which gives work visas to skilled professionals, mostly IT employees. They claim Globalcynex failed to properly pay them for all hours worked.

The DOL announced that this type of case is a priority, because the department wants to be sure employers don’t try to skirt around labor laws by hiring foreign workers and thinking they can get away with legal violations.

A recent Department of Labor (DOL) opinion letter tackled the question of how to track time when nonexempt employees take mandatory online training on their home computers. A company asked if that time can simply be added to employees’ time sheets.

The answer: Paper time sheets are fine. The Fair Labor Standards Act mentions that all time spent working must be paid for, including hours worked at home, as long as the employer “knows or has reason to believe” the work is being done.

But it doesn’t tell companies how that time needs to be tracked, as long as the information is collected and can be preserved. Therefore, the DOL said, old-fashioned paper time sheets still get a passing grade.

Read the opinion letter here.