Fundamentals of Human Resource Management 6th Edition by Raymond Noe, John Hollenbeck, Barry Gerhart,Patrick Wright

Exercise 7

Overlooking Overtime
The Labor Department recently required two Texas companies to pay workers back wages for overtime. An investigation by the Wage and Hour Division found that a construction company had failed to account for all of its workers' hours in determining their eligibility to be paid at one and a half times their regular rates. The company was supposed to count all of workers' scheduled and unscheduled hours, including the time spent traveling to and from work sites, between the times they started and ended the workday. However, when unscheduled hours such as travel time exceeded the 40-hour workweek, the company did not count those hours and pay the workers at time and a half.
At a firm that provides maintenance and construction services to an oil and gas refinery, the problem was that the company told managers they would be paid a salary, but then the company actually paid the managers on an hourly basis, at least when it benefited the company. If a manager worked less than a 40-hour workweek, the company paid the manager at an hourly rate totaling less than the full-time salary. However, if a manager worked more than 50 hours, the company did not pay the manager for overtime. The managers could have qualified as exempt because they were performing managerial duties, but for the company to apply that classification legally, it had to pay them a flat rather than an hourly amount.
How could the construction company in the first example have met the legal requirements for overtime pay