Minimum wage, overtime, and who the Act covers

Every wage-and-hour question in this book traces back to four ideas: two pay promises, a coverage test, and a fixed unit of time. Get these straight first and the rest of the Act makes sense.

In this chapter

The Act makes exactly two baseline promises: a wage floor and a premium for hours over 40.
Coverage usually turns on the individual employee’s own work — engaged in commerce or in producing goods for commerce — not just the employer’s size.
The workweek is the fixed 7-day unit every pay and overtime calculation is built on, and recordkeeping exists to prove what happened inside it.