The Fair Labor Standards Act makes two separate promises to a covered employee. (Which employees are exempt from these promises is addressed in Chapter 2, “The exempt employee test: salary basis, salary level, and primary duty.”) It is worth holding the two promises apart from the start, because employers sometimes treat them as one requirement. Section 6 requires the payment of a minimum wage — a floor under every hour worked. Section 7 is a different rule entirely: it prohibits employing a covered worker beyond a specified number of hours in a workweek (a fixed, regularly recurring period of 168 hours — seven consecutive 24-hour periods — that need not coincide with the calendar week) unless the employer pays proper overtime compensation for the hours beyond that point. One rule sets a price per hour; the other sets a price for working too many hours in a week. Both apply by default to a covered employee, and satisfying one does not excuse an employer from the other.

The overtime promise has its own internal logic. Section 7(a) prescribes the maximum weekly hours an employee may work without extra pay — as a general standard, 40 hours in a workweek. It also requires a general overtime rate of not less than one and one-half times the employee’s regular rate — the hourly rate actually paid for the employee’s normal, non-overtime workweek — for every hour worked beyond that applicable maximum in the workweek. Employing a covered worker in any workweek brings the provision into operation; once the maximum is crossed, the employer is prohibited from continuing that work without paying the required extra compensation. Apart from the Act’s child labor provisions, the Act does not cap the number of hours an employee may work in a week at all — an employee may work as many hours a week as employee and employer see fit (subject to those child labor rules), so long as the overtime premium is paid on the hours above the maximum.

The two promises also connect at the paycheck. The regular rate used to calculate overtime can never be set below the statutory minimum established under Section 6 — so the overtime premium is always built on top of at least the minimum wage, never on some lower figure. That statutory minimum is the minimum wage applicable to the employee under Section 6, with one qualification: § 778.107 makes an exception for workers covered by Section 14’s special minimum-wage provisions and workers in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and American Samoa who are covered by wage orders (minimum-wage schedules issued under Section 8 of the Act) — for them, their own applicable minimum controls instead. If an employee’s actual regular rate is higher than the statutory minimum, overtime is computed on that higher rate instead. This distinction — a wage floor for every hour, and a separate premium once weekly hours run past the maximum — is what the rest of this book builds on: who counts as an employee, what counts as hours worked, and how the regular rate itself is calculated.