Question Concerning Responding to Employer of Minor Daughter Paid Under Minimum Wage My high school daughter worked for about a year for an employer who owns a tutoring company in our town. Due to friction between my daughter and the employer, my daughter recently quit but she realized that she was being underpaid for much of this year (2023) because the minimum wage here in California is currently $15.50 for 2023 but she was still getting paid $14.00, the California minimum wage for 2022, when she recently quit (in August 2023). Now according to my daughter there is a provision in California law which allows employers to pay only 85% of minimum wage for new workers with no prior experience for their first 160 hours of work. For 2023, that &quot;new worker&quot; wage level would work out to $13.17 per hour, but my daughter said that she exceeded her first 160 hours of work for the employer back in March 2023. So, basically, my daughter was being paid under the proper CA 2023 minimum wage for over the past 4 months. When my daughter contacted her former employer about this problem, the employer was apologetic and emailed back saying that a financial transaction to her to correct for the underpayment would be sent as soon as my daughter emailed back an enclosed payment settlement form. The settlement form basically says &quot;I hereby agree that the net payment of $XXX represents the full and final settlement of my account with Company XXX&quot;, and there are signature lines at the bottom of the form for my daughter's signature as well as my signature as her parent. I'm currently thinking &quot;Why should I, the parent, need to sign anything here?&quot;. The employer underpaid my daughter and she acknowledges that she underpaid my daughter, so it seems that she is responsible for paying my daughter the money she already owes her for the work that my daughter already did, regardless of whether I sign any form or not. Any thoughts on all of this?
Read the terms It’s quite likely that, if you took this to court, the employer would be liable to pay your daughter interest on the underpayment and possibly be fined by the state for failing to follow the law. The terms probably are offering to pay the back pay with no interest and your daughter agreeing to confidentiality about the breach. Probably - I haven’t read them. In other words, they’re asking her to sign a contract saying she gets $XXX now, and can’t make any further claims against them. Such releases are commonplace when setting a dispute and there’s probably nothing underhanded going on. Probably - I haven’t read them. Because minors can void contracts if they are not in their interest, they want you, as her legal guardian, to also sign so that can’t happen. A relatively prudent precaution on their part. The alternative is to not sign the document and they presumably won’t pay. It will then be up to you whether to sue them which will cost you money, possibly more than you will get if you win. As to whether there is a dispute: they want your signature, you don’t want to sign - that’s a dispute. Any admissions they have made in their settlement offer are almost surely without prejudice, meaning they are inadmissible in court. If you want to sue, you would have to prove the underpayment without relying on their admissions. As stated above, maybe there is no underpayment. Only you and your daughter can decide if this is a good deal.
Generally, what you say you will do in a contract is what you must do - there is no "the dog ate my homework" excuse. For your examples: Employment contracts have so much government regulation that the common law contract is lost in the mists of time. It is unlikely that a court would interpret an employment contract as requiring exact timekeeping; it is also unlikely that the person would have worked exactly 38 hours on every week except the one where they worked 37.5. However, if it were proved that the employee owed 0.5 hours to the employer they could be required to provide it or refund the pay they had received, barring a law that changed this. The dog must be walked. Alice must find a substitute walker if she is unable to provide it. Falling sick is something foreseeable that Alice should have provided for either in the contract ("if I am sick I won't walk the dog") or by arranging for someone else to do it. For purely personal services, falling sick may frustrate the contract, however, dog-walking is probably not personal enough. There is a doctrine which allows termination by frustration where neither party is at fault, however, it is not clear that this would apply. The building burning down is foreseeable and could (should?) have been addressed in the contract. If the destruction of the building was without fault on the owner then the contract is frustrated. If there was some fault on the owner (smoking in bed, inoperative fire alarm etc.) and the cleaner stands willing, ready and able (that is able except for the absence of a building) to perform their obligations, the owner would probably be obliged to pay, at the least for unrecoverable costs (e.g. wages) and loss of profits - if they pay for the cleaning products the cleaner would be obliged to deliver them up. One of the main reasons for the length of contracts for non-trivial transactions is they deal with these contingencies.
What follows is a broad overview. I'm not an expert in this; I just have a bit of experience in this due to a tax situation my wife &amp; I experienced a few years ago. Please do not rely on this advice except as a starting point for more Googling. Your obligations (and your assistant's) will depend on whether the assistant is an employee or an independent contractor. In general, an independent contractor is someone you hire to "get a job done"; you have minimal control over the manner, time, place, tools, etc., that the assistant uses. An employee, on the other hand, is someone you hire to come to work at a particular time and do the job a particular way. (I'm glossing over some details here; see the IRS link above for more details.) If your assistant is an independent contractor, and you pay them over a certain threshold ($600 for 2020), you must provide them with Form 1099-MISC, and file a copy with the IRS as well. Your assistant will then be liable for income taxes on this amount, as well as self-employment tax (see below.) If your assistant is actually an employee, and you pay them over a certain threshold ($600 for 2020), you are required to provide them with a W-2 form, as well as filing a copy with the IRS. In addition, if you pay them more than a higher threshold ($2200 in a tax year or $1000 in any quarter for 2020), you are responsible for withholding taxes from their paychecks, as well as paying the employer's portion of Social Security, Medicare, and/or federal unemployment taxes. How to figure these taxes is complex, but generally the employee must provide you with a completed W-4, and then you must provide them (and the IRS) with a W-2 at the end of the tax year. See Publication 15: Employer's Tax Guide for all the gory details. The self-employment tax is designed to effectively cover the employer's portion of these taxes for self-employed workers. As you might imagine, employers are often tempted to misclassify employees as "independent contractors", since this means that this tax liability gets pushed from them onto their workers, as well as just making the employer's life easier. The Feds will not take kindly to such misclassification if it is discovered. Finally, for the state of Connecticut, consult the CT 1009-MISC filing guide (if your assistant is an independent contractor) or the Connecticut employer's tax guide (if they are an employee). The distinction is pretty much the same as at the federal level.
An agreement to agree is void There is a multitude of case law on this point. If the NDA was not available to you when you signed the employment contract and the term was couched as you describe; then the term would be unenforcable. That is, your employment contract would be binding except for that term i.e. you could not be compelled to sign the NDA. Now, there may be a requirement on you to negotiate in good faith in an attempt to find an NDA you can agree to but if you can't find one you can't find one. You cannot (legally) be fired for this reason. Now, if the NDA was available, and you were told where to find it, and irrespective of if you did or didn't find it, you would be bound to the NDA.
Given that they told me I would get back pay and I worked conditional on that information, am I entitled to it? You are entitled to backpay in accordance with the terms you accepted from HR. The employer's refusal to pay you from October 1st is in violation of Austria's Allgemeines bürgerliches Gesetzbuch at § 860a. At this point you have fully complied with the conditions on which your continued employment was contingent. From then on, the employer's belatedness in revoking its commitment to backdate your start date to October 1st is not cognizable: Prior to your full compliance with the conditions of academic nature, there was no possible way for you to be aware of the employer's repudiation of its obligations regarding the October-December compensation. The employer's failure to timely notify you of the unilateral change is especially notorious and hard to justify. Your employment &amp; relocation to Austria suggests that the employer had --and waived-- ample opportunity to inform you that any work you perform prior to addressing the contingent aspect will not be compensated. Even if the employer ventures with a dubious allegation of that sort, it is unlikely to survive § 1152.
There is a specific exemption in 29 USC 213(c)(3) that The provisions of section 212 of this title relating to child labor shall not apply to any child employed as an actor or performer in motion pictures or theatrical productions, or in radio or television productions. See this article for further analysis, a propos state laws. Incidentally, the act defines "oppressive child labor" as: a condition of employment under which (1) any employee under the age of sixteen years is employed by an employer (other than a parent or a person standing in place of a parent employing his own child or a child in his custody under the age of sixteen years in an occupation other than manufacturing or mining or an occupation found by the Secretary of Labor to be particularly hazardous for the employment of children between the ages of sixteen and eighteen years or detrimental to their health or well-being) in any occupation, or (2) any employee between the ages of sixteen and eighteen years is employed by an employer in any occupation which the Secretary of Labor shall find and by order declare to be particularly hazardous for the employment of children between such ages or detrimental to their health or well-being; but oppressive child labor shall not be deemed to exist by virtue of the employment in any occupation of any person with respect to whom the employer shall have on file an unexpired certificate issued and held pursuant to regulations of the Secretary of Labor certifying that such person is above the oppressive child-labor age. The Secretary of Labor shall provide by regulation or by order that the employment of employees between the ages of fourteen and sixteen years in occupations other than manufacturing and mining shall not be deemed to constitute oppressive child labor if and to the extent that the Secretary of Labor determines that such employment is confined to periods which will not interfere with their schooling and to conditions which will not interfere with their health and well-being. Without the statutory exemption, if you are under 16 and employed by a non-parent, in any occupation, that is oppressive child labor. But because of the specific exemption, what would otherwise be statutorily oppressive child labor is allowed. The political "why" question (why did the bill contain such language) is extremely difficult to answer. The only substantive clues that I have seen are in a 1959 dissertation by G.E. Paulsen and this article on the passage of the act. It seems to be a legislative compromise relating stricter original standards, and was particularly driven by the need to allow children to work on family farms. The relevant clause was added from the floor of the House on May 24, 1938 by Rep Charles Kramer (CA). This is recorded on p. 7441 of the Congressional Record, which, unfortunately, is not freely available online. The two toughest questions were asked by Schneider (WI), Kramer's reply in parentheses: The gentleman's amendment would exempt children engaged only in the making of moving pictures? (The gentleman is correct) There are very few young people employed in that occupation? (Very few. There are hardly more than 10 employed at one time.) Shirley Temple was in fact invoked by Kramer.
I don't know of any federal law that is violated. US labor law is generally favorable to employers, compared to many other countries, and gives employers a lot of freedom in setting policies and rules, The theory is that an employee who doesn't like it can go and work somewhere else, and an employer with unreasonable policies will eventually be unable to get people to work for them. In particular, it surprises some people that employers aren't legally obligated to reimburse travel expenses at all: The FSLA does not have any rules regarding an employer's obligation to reimburse an employee for business-related travel expenses. No federal law requires reimbursement. So it would be perfectly legal for the company to require employees to pay for all their own meals when traveling on business. Given this, I'd expect that the company would have pretty broad discretion to place conditions and restrictions on reimbursement, including what they will and won't pay for. If an employee had a disability or religious beliefs that required them to eat meat, and the company wouldn't grant them an exception, they might have a claim under the ADA or Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act respectively. But if it's just that they happen to prefer meat, I don't think there's a law to guarantee them such a right. Some states could have their own laws that might be violated, though I tend to doubt it. If you have a particular state in mind, please specify.
They can ask, but there is nothing in law - that I can find - which obligates an answer. (There may be some exceptions that require a previous employer to provide a reference which might include this detail, but that does not appear relevant here.) As an aside, there is an ongoing #EndSalaryHistory campaign by the Fawcett Society which is focused on equal pay and sexual equality in the workplace, and they are calling on employers to: stop asking salary history questions...