Unpaid Wages
State laws provide a variety of legal protections of wages and other working conditions. These are separate and distinct from those rights protected by the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.
The section “Unpaid Wages,” concerns your rights under the State law. These rights apply only for the States indicated in this section. To learn what your Federal rights are, go to “Overtime Pay” .
Employers must obey both State and Federal law. Whichever of the two laws protects the worker better must be obeyed. So, if the federal law requires only $5.15 as minimum wage and the state law requires $6.75, the state law must be obeyed.
Workers, therefore, should check both this section and the section called “Overtime Pay” in order to learn their rights. For example, restaurant workers may be exempt from overtime pay under the state law, but they are not exempt under the federal law.
MAINE
“We Enforce The Wage Laws” is the motto of the Law Office. It enforces vigorously the additional protections provided by Maine law to Maine workers. On a daily basis the office confers with workers on the telephone concerning pay issues, advises them, negotiates for them, settles cases, and files numerous cases in state court.
State Minimum Wage And Overtime Laws.
Maine has a full statute, similar to the Fair Labor Standards Act, covering Maine workers. However, in several respects the Maine statute is more favorable. Fontaine Law Office frequently enforces the State Act in preference to the Federal Act. For example, the Maine minimum wage as of January 2007 was $6.75 as compared with the Federal minimum wage $5.15. Moreover, there are several categories of Maine worker who are protected by the Maine overtime law, but who are exempt and unprotected by the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act. In addition, the overtime exemption for “White Collar Employees” [CLICK] under the Federal law is broader than under the Maine law, so that some white collar workers are eligible for overtime under the Maine law, but ineligible for overtime under the federal law. Also, the Maine law is more favorable because it permits workers to claim six years of back minimum wage and overtime payments, whereas the federal law permits only two years in most cases. Another example of the more favorable provisions of state law is that Maine law makes mandatory that the court award “liquidated damages” and attorney’s fees to the employee who is successful in court. “Liquidated Damages,” means an additional amount of money over and above the minimum wages or overtime wages that were unpaid. The amount is the same amount as the wages that were unpaid.
Nevertheless, in spite of the sometimes more favorable state law provisions in Maine, on many occasions the meaning of the state law is unclear. This is because of the lack of sufficient decisions to explain the state law as compared with the many decisions explaining the federal law. In that situation, the Fontaine Law Office attempts to persuade the court that the favorable federal guidelines should be used to interpret state law.
Timely Payment And Other Maine State Wage Protection Laws.Maine law also regulates not only how much must be paid an employee, but when it must be paid. Maine’s timely payment of wages law requires that workers be paid all the wages they earn to within eight days of the payment date, and that the interval between paydays cannot exceed sixteen days. Such a law is necessary because of the behavior of some employers who do not pay their employees regularly, especially those working on commissions. Fontaine Law Office was in the forefront of the rewriting of this law to cover all employees in the State of Maine when previously it only covered certain occupations. Five class actions were filed. Legislative hearings were held, and the law was changed. See In Re Wage Payment Litigation, 2000 ME 162; 759 A2d 217. The Maine timely pay law also requires that wages be paid within a fixed time after an employee leaves an employer. The penalty for violating either timely payment law is triple damages plus attorney’s fees. The Fontaine Law Office vigorously enforces this provision on a regular basis.
Other wage protection laws that exist in Maine are the severance pay law, the unfair agreements law, the law protecting employees vacation wages, access to personnel files, written statement for the reasons for termination, and the prevailing wage law for employees working under State contracts.
Fontaine Law Office is among a select group of law firms in the United States with broad expertise in wage protection law for the benefit of employees and really the only law office in Maine with this broad expertise.