If the Department brings an enforcement action on your behalf, you are entitled to recover the full amount due under the FFCRA (see Question 7), which is the greater of your regular rate (see Question 8) or the applicable minimum wage (federal, state, or local) for each hour of uncompensated paid sick leave taken, in each case, subject to the applicable FFCRA maximums (see Question 7). The FFCRA and the Department’s regulations state that an employer who does not compensate you for taking paid sick leave is “considered to have failed to pay the minimum wage … and shall be subject to the enforcement provisions” of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Those enforcement provisions state that the employer “shall be liable to the employee or employees affected in the amount of their unpaid minimum wages.” For the purposes of the FFCRA, the “amount of unpaid minimum wages” does not refer to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, but rather to the hourly wage at which the employer must compensate you for taking paid sick leave, which is, generally, the greater of your regular rate or the applicable minimum wage (federal, state, or local).
Thus, if the Department brings an enforcement action on your behalf, your recovery against an employer that refuses to compensate you for taking paid sick leave would not be limited to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour if your regular rate or an applicable state or local minimum wage were higher. For example, if your regular rate were $30 per hour and you lawfully took 20 hours of paid sick leave to self-quarantine based on the advice of a health care provider, you may recover $600 ($30 per hour times 20 hours) from your employer. As another example, if you were entitled to a state or local minimum wage of $15 and lawfully took 20 hours of paid sick leave for the same reason, you may recover $300 ($15 per hour times 20 hours). However, you may not recover more than the amount due under the FFCRA. For instance, if your employer initially agreed to pay your full hourly rate of $30 per hour to allow you to take paid sick leave to care for your child whose school is closed, but then pays you only 2/3 of your hourly rate, as required by the FFCRA, you may not recover the unpaid portion of the initially agreed amount because your employer was not required by the FFCRA to pay that portion.
2020
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