An Administrator's Guide to California Private School Law

Chapter 6 – Wage And Hour Laws

Any alternative schedule must provide at least four hours of work in each work day in the alternative workweek. 642 The alternative workweeks are valid so long as they are regular and recurring and are not developed for the purpose of evading eight hour day requirements. 643 The schedules may even be different from week to week, as long as the entire pattern is recurring. 644 Although the school may make occasional changes on reasonable notice, frequent changes will cause the school to lose the alternative workweek exemption. 645 The school will then be liable for overtime if an employee works over eight hours in a workday. “Reasonable notice” is considered one week’s notice. 646 b. Types Of Alternative Workweeks Employees can work a variety of work schedules when an alternative workweek is adopted. An employee may work any amount of a day greater than four hours as long as the school pays overtime for working after ten hours in a day and over forty (40) hours per workweek. 647 Below are some examples of valid alternative workweeks:  Four days of nine hours and one day of four hours.

 A recurring schedule where the first week the employee works 10 hours Monday through Thursday and in the second week works 10 hours Tuesday through Friday.  A 9/80 schedule in which employees are scheduled to work 8 nine hour days, 1 eight hour day, and have one day off every other week. Scheduled overtime can be avoided by designating an employee’s workweek to begin four hours into the employee’s eight hour day, and designating the employee’s day off on the same day of the week in the following week.

2. E XAMPLE O F O VERTIME F OR W ORK I N E XCESS O F D AILY O R W EEKLY A LTERNATIVE W ORKWEEK For example, an employee’s alternative schedule may require him or her to work four days of nine hours and one day of four hours. If the employee works 13 hours on a regularly scheduled nine hour day, the school must pay time and a half for the tenth through twelfth hours and double time for the thirteenth hour. 3. D ISCLOSURE A ND S ECRET B ALLOTING R EQUIRED The IWC Wage Orders detail the procedural steps that the school must abide by in creating alternative workweek schedules for employees. Although these steps are very detailed and tedious, a school must follow them if it intends to adopt an alternative workweek. Each proposal for an alternative workweek schedule shall be in the form of a written agreement proposed by the school. The proposed agreement must designate a regularly scheduled alternative workweek in which the specified number of work days and work hours are regularly recurring. The actual days worked within that alternative workweek schedule need not be specified. The school may propose a single work schedule that would become the standard

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