Labor & Employment Law Blog

On January 15, 2021, in the case of Scalia v. Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, 985 F.3d 742 (2021), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal decided that for an employee, who works a rotational schedule of seven days on, followed by seven days off, both his “on” and “off” weeks shall be used to calculate the length of “12 workweeks of leave” under the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA).  As such, when a rotational employee takes continuous leave, both his on and off weeks count toward his “workweeks of leave” under Section 2612(a)(1) of the FMLA.

On February 8, 2021, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision clarifying the circumstances under which a per diem benefit must be included in the regular rate of pay for overtime purposes under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).  The court held that since per diem benefits functioned as compensation for work rather than as reimbursement for expenses incurred by traveling healthcare clinicians, they were improperly excluded from the clinicians’ regular rates of pay for purposes of calculating overtime pay under federal law. Clarke v. AMN Servs., LLC (9th Cir., 2021) No. 19-55784, 2021 WL 419473.