Small-biz group: Devil’s in the minimum-wage details

Friday’s start of Oregon’s new three-tier minimum-wage law can be potentially full of paperwork perils for small-business owners who think just knowing their new regional rate is enough, their representative group warned.

In a guest editorial to appear in the July issue of the Salem Business Journal, Anthony K. Smith, Oregon state director for the National Federation of Independent Business, alerts Main Street entrepreneurs to a few devils in the details.

“To complicate things further, the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) recently adopted the final rules for determining employer location, specifically addressing the issue of how employees should be paid if part of their work week is spent in a higher-tier region.

“For example, if an employee spends less than 50 percent of his or her time at the employer’s location, and the employee works in more than one region in a pay period, the employer now has to pay the employee the regional rate for each hour worked in each respective region. (Delivery drivers are excluded, so long as they start and end their day at the employer’s location.)

“Now add to this higher cost of doing business, the paperwork headache of maintaining records of the locations in which the employee worked. Want to avoid hours of compliance record-keeping? No problem, just go ahead and pay the highest rate.

“Read that last sentence one more time. An employer can get out of the paperwork requirement as long as he or she pays the highest rate, which, ironically enough, completely contradicts the stated purpose of the three-tiered-minimum-wage approach.”