California Professional Exemption From Overtime

The Industrial Welfare Commission, ICW Wage Order No. 4, and Labor Code §515,
set forth the requirements which must be complied with to classify an employee as exempt from applicable labor laws. For an employee to be exempt from these rules as a bona fide “professional,” all the following criteria must be met and the Employers have the burden of proving that:

(a)     The employee is primarily engaged in an occupation commonly recognized as a learned or artistic profession. For the  
          purposes of this subsection, “learned or artistic profession” means an employee who is primarily engaged in the  
          performance of:

 (1)        Work requiring knowledge of an advanced type in a field or science or learning customarily acquired
  by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction and study, as distinguished from a
 general academic education and from an apprenticeship, and from training in the performance of
  routine mental, manual, or physical processes, or work that is an essential part or necessarily                                      
  incident to any of the above work; or,

(2)      Work that is original and creative in character in a recognized field of artistic endeavor, and the result of which depends primarily on the invention, imagination or talent of the employee or work that is an essential part of or incident to any of the above work; and, (3) Whose work is predominately intellectual and varied in character as opposed to routine mental, manual, mechanical, or physical work) and is of such character cannot be standardized in relation to a given period of time;

(b) The employee must customarily and regularly exercise discretion and
independent judgment; and,

(c) The employee earns a monthly salary equivalent to no less than two (2) times the state minimum wage for full-time employment.

If you think that your current or former employer may have misclassified you as exempt from overtime based on the professional exemption, contact Blumenthal, Nordrehaug & Bhowmik now by calling (858) 551-1223 for a free consultation. You may be entitled to recover your overtime wages plus damages, regardless of whether or not you were paid a salary.