Cincinnati lawyer Peter K. Newman, partner with Greenebaum, Doll & McDonald, has pored over new federal overtime regulations, presented seminars to numerous companies and advised executives and owners that the rules warrant immediate attention. If companies have a problem with compliance, he suggests, it's better to fix it now rather than wait for the Department of Labor to come calling.

THREE THINGS companies should do now?

They shouldn't panic.

WAIT - IT'S NEVER too soon to panic.

Hah, well, it's true the new rules are here, and essentially what they've done is anybody who makes $100,000 (a year) or more isn't entitled to overtime. Anybody who makes less than $23,600 is entitled. Within that gray area, employers have to do a couple of things. They have to decide which employees are classified under white-collar exemptions: executives, administrative professionals, computer professionals and outside sales employees.

The first step is a self-audit, and they may want to hire a lawyer. If they discover they have a problem, fix it. The next thing, prepare a list of all the people working for you by their job classification. Make a list of the exempt. Make a list of the non-exempt. For those listed as exempt, find out what people are being paid. If it's less than $450 (a week), they are automatically non-exempt. The employer has to decide: raise their salary or reclassify?

CAN COMPANIES EXPECT a knock on the door from the Labor Department?

New phenomena in employment law are called collective actions under the Fair Labor Standards Act. All an employee has to say is he's a manager who believes he's been misclassified as an executive employee because his primary duty isn't managing but is cooking, say. He says there are 5,000 others like him. If a plaintiff makes that kind of showing, the court will conditionally certify the collective action and the plaintiff gets to send opt-out notices to all 5,000 restaurant managers. The Fair Labor Standards Act was intended to make it easy for someone to bring a collective action. Someone may file a collective action. That's the bigger concern.

All a person has to do is file a claim. The DOL will investigate, and if the employer is found to have misclassified a person, the person is entitled, at a minimum, to two years of back overtime pay.

John Eckberg