Chapter 7 introduced the split-day plan as one of the artificial regular-rate schemes the Act does not tolerate; this section works through why it fails. The plan — sometimes called the “Poxon” plan — takes an employee’s ordinary workday and slices it in two on paper: a “straight time” block covering the first few hours, paid at a rate set arbitrarily low (often at or near the minimum), and an “overtime” block covering the rest of the day, paid at one and one-half times that low rate. An employee arbitrarily assigned $5 an hour for the first four hours of an eight-hour day and $7.50 for the last four receives $20 plus $30 — $50 for the day, exactly what a straight $6.25 hourly rate would produce. The employer then points to the “time and one-half” label on the second block and claims the overtime obligation for the week is already satisfied.

The division is fictitious, and the source text says so directly: the low hourly figure is not the employee’s actual regular rate, and the higher figure is not paid for overtime work at all — it is not geared to hours in excess of the employee’s normal working hours, nor to time outside a basic workday established in good faith. Because the “overtime” segment does not correspond to any real overtime, it cannot supply the premium the Act requires. In Walling v. Helmerich & Payne, the Supreme Court found this arrangement violated the overtime provisions; the correct regular rate is the one the numbers actually produce — here, $6.25 an hour — with additional overtime compensation owed for every hour past the applicable maximum hours standard.

None of this forbids paying an employee two or more different rates in the same workweek — only paying two labels for the same rate. Where an employee genuinely performs two or more different kinds of work in a workweek, each with its own nonovertime rate set at or above the minimum wage, the regular rate is the weighted average: total earnings from all the rates, divided by total hours worked at all of them. The difference is that the rates in a lawful multi-rate arrangement attach to different work, while the split-day plan’s two rates attach to identical work, divided only by an arbitrary clock boundary.