Wage an hour laws can be a confusing area of employment law. It’s not surprising that our legal experts are kept busy answering subscribers’ inquiries about how employees are to be properly paid. Here’s a sampling of recent questions.

Q: Can we pay nonexempt employees by commission?

A: Not unless they’re being paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25, or your state’s if it’s higher, for each hour they work. When they are paid by commission, it must equal at least minimum wage; if it does not in a given week, the employer must supplement the payment.

Q: Must we pay commissioned field adjusters minimum wage for just standing by?

A: The answer depends on whether the adjusters can use the standing-by time effectively for their own personal purposes—a very individual determination. In general, an employee who is on duty and waiting to be assigned a task is considered to be working. Examples of compensable time include the time an employee spends waiting for a meeting to begin, the time a factory worker spends talking with co-workers while waiting for a machine to be fixed, and the time a repair person spends waiting for the customer to get the premises ready.

An example of noncompensable waiting time is when employees have been told it will take 4 hours to fix a machine, and they are allowed to leave the premises if they wish and return at an appointed time. On-call time, which may or may not be what you mean by "standing by," usually means that the employee is not on the employer’s premises. If the employee cannot use the on-call time effectively for personal purposes, it must be paid.

Q: If exempt employees have used up all their accrued paid time off for the year, but they need to take another day off for either personal illness or another reason, can we dock their pay for missed days without jeopardizing their exempt status?

A: The answer is in our exempt employee topic, but here’s a summary. First, remember that the FLSA does not regulate vacation, severance, sick, and holiday pay. Most of these are a matter of company policy that should be enforced in a consistent and nondiscriminatory way. Be cautious about deducting pay from exempt employees, but it can be done. You can deduct for a full day taken off for personal reasons or sickness or disability, but never for a partial day.

An exempt employee who does any work on a day must be paid for the whole day. Employers may, however, deduct whole or partial days from exempt employees’ paid time off for any sort of absence. Avoid using pay deductions to discipline an exempt employee who abuses the company’s policy on work time; use whatever other form of discipline is provided for under the policy.