The home improvement store Home Depot is initiating a nationwide overhaul to its hourly wage structure.
“As laws, technology, and workplace practices continue to evolve, we will begin paying hourly associates to the nearest minute based on exact time punches on January 16, 2023,” a Home Depot spokeswoman confirmed to FOX Business.
The new policy will replace the present practice, which, according to a spokeswoman, “has been to round total shift time to the nearest 15 minutes.” According to the representative, this “has been a standard industry practice for decades.”
The move was initially revealed by Business Insider on Wednesday.
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) permits rounding, noting that many businesses prefer to round to the “nearest five minutes, or to the nearest tenth or quarter of an hour.
It must be “utilized in a manner that will not, over time, deprive employees of proper compensation for all the time they have actually worked,” according to the regulation.
Business Insider also noted that in previous lawsuits, a few employees made compensation-related claims over Home Depot’s rounding methods.
Home Depot traditionally rounded total shift duration to the nearest 15-minute increment.
As of the end of October, Home Depot has over 2,300 stores and around 500,000 employees, the firm announced recently.
In November, the firm reported that its third-quarter net sales climbed by 5.6% year-over-year to $38.87 billion. Its net earnings were $4.34 billion, up 5.1% from $4.13 billion in the third quarter of the prior year.
According to the results statement, Home Depot projected “comparable sales growth of approximately 3.0 percent” and “diluted earnings-per-share-growth in the mid-single digits” for fiscal 2022.
Early Thursday afternoon, the home improvement retailer’s shares was trading for slightly over $330.
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