IT Help Desk Employees and the FLSA
On October 26, 2006, the Department of Labor issued an opinion letter which had a massive impact on California’s IT community. Resolving a long standing dispute, DOL stated that employees who provide computer help desk support are not exempt from overtime under the “administrative” white collar or computer exemptions.
The industry has responded slowly to the DOL opinion, and many companies remain unaware of the implications of misclassifying tech workers as exempt. Jackson West with Valleywag notes that the practice of misclassifying nonexempt IT professionals as exempt is “endemic in California,” particularly at start-ups where long hours are common. One year ago, Kent Blake of Redmondmag.com, an online magazine which follows issues impacting the Microsoft IT community, characterized the scope of the problem as “the help desk overtime bomb.” Is the bomb ticking or has it exploded? Ask Apple and IBM. They have both been sued for misclassifying help desk employees and network engineers, with IBM settling their lawsuit in November 2008 for $65 million dollars.
If you are a computer professional in a tech position, your entitlement to overtime depends on whether your duties involve systems analysis and the application of programs, or implementing specifications developed by someone else for the purposes of troubleshooting customer or employee problems.
