With our nation’s complex labor laws, it’s not easy to know whether you’re being paid fairly for all your hard work. Key sticking points can include overtime pay and non-work activities encouraged by your employer. Fortunately, new guidance sheds light on some of those concerns.

At the end of August, the U.S. Department of Labor posted a series of opinion letters addressing compensation issues related to employer-sponsored wellness activities, overtime pay and volunteering.

The letters are intended to clarify wage and hour issues, a practice revived this year for the first time since 2010. They respond to questions about how the department’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) would apply the law to specific situations, so it’s important to note that differences in details may change the guidance, but the information often is broadly helpful. Earlier this year, we unpacked WHD guidance about whether employees should be paid for work travel and breaks.

Here are the latest topics the WHD tackled:

Wellness on the clock

Wellness initiatives have grown in popularity at many companies. So if your employer offers voluntary events such as wellness activities, biometric screenings or benefits fairs, should you be on the clock while you attend? According to the WHD, the answer is no.

Basically, as long as participation is up to the employee and the events aren’t related to the employee’s job duties, the opinion letter reads, wellness offerings benefit the employee more than the employer. That means an employee need not be paid for that time, even if the activities are at the workplace or during regular working hours.

Overtime pay for sales people

If you work at a retail or service establishment, there’s a good chance you won’t get overtime pay for topping 40 hours a week (or whatever threshold your state sets for overtime pay). But what if your sales targets are businesses?

The law exempts employers from paying overtime to retail or service employees if their regular rate of pay was more than one-and-a-half times minimum wage during that work week and if commissions made up more than half of what the employee earned during a representative period.

In the specific scenario, the employees were selling merchants a tech platform to handle credit card payments from their customers. Each platform was tailored to the particular user, so it couldn’t be resold.

Based on various precedents, the WHD’s opinion letter states, the sales people need not be paid overtime, so long as the retailer exemption qualifications we mentioned above are met. The employer in question would qualify as a retailer for various reasons, including that it doesn’t sell in bulk and that its products are not resold. It doesn’t matter that the end users are businesses; they are still the end users.

Overtime pay at dine-in movie theaters

Employees at movie theaters are exempt from overtime pay requirements, but what if the theater serves food (we’re not talking just candy and popcorn)?

During the past several years, movie theaters have pushed toward a more luxurious experience, including offering dining options in the theaters and sometimes also in on-site restaurants. But according to the WHD’s recent opinion letter, that doesn’t disqualify a theater from the motion picture theater exemption to overtime pay requirements.

Several factors went into the determination. The WHD considers an entity to be a motion picture theater when it uses at least half of available presentation time to show movies.

Even if it also offers full-service dining, its primary function remains as a theater so long as the theater and food service operations effectively function as a single entity, with the same entrances, names, bank accounts, tax filings, employees, general manager, etc., and the primary revenue source is movie ticket sales.

Is it really volunteering if your expenses are paid?

A third WHD opinion letter addresses what makes a job voluntary. If a person performing a job receives no fee for her labor, the function can be considered volunteer work, even if travel, lodging, meals and other related expenses are covered.

Specifically, a nonprofit that offers tests required for professional designations (credentials) asked about its test graders — typically, well-paid executives who grade for one or two weeks a year, often using vacation or leave time from their regular jobs to do so. In surveys, the graders had indicated that their primary motivation for serving was giving back to the profession or to the nonprofit. A flat fee previously paid for their work was going to be discontinued, so the WHD determined a volunteer status appropriate.

Do you think your employer is treating you unfairly? Contact Keller Grover for a free consultation. With more than 25 years of experience, the lawyers at Keller Grover have secured over $100 million in recoveries for victims of wage theft.