Workers usually sense they are being underpaid long before they can show it. The gap between sensing and showing is almost always documentation — and most of it is documentation your employer is legally required to give you.
The basic overtime rule
Most employees must be paid one and a half times their regular rate for hours worked beyond forty in a week. The protection comes from both federal and New York law. Two misunderstandings cause most of the trouble: being paid a salary does not by itself make someone exempt from overtime, and a job title does not decide the question. What matters is the actual duties performed and how pay is structured.
The wage statement you are owed
New York requires employers to give employees a statement with each payment of wages, setting out the dates covered, rates of pay and basis, gross and net wages, deductions, and — for workers who are not exempt — the regular rate, the overtime rate, and the hours worked at each. A pay stub that hides hours, lumps everything into a single figure, or never shows an overtime rate is itself a signal worth examining.
Where unpaid time hides
Work before a shift clocks in or after it clocks out. Working through an unpaid meal break. Travel between job sites during the day. Time spent on a phone answering messages. Automatic deductions for breaks that were never taken. None of these look dramatic individually; across months they add up.
Keep your own record
Note your start and finish times each day and what you did, in a place your employer does not control. Save pay stubs and schedules. If hours are tracked by an app, screenshot your own totals periodically. These records matter because where an employer's records are missing or unreliable, a worker's credible account of their hours carries real weight.
Raising it
Retaliation for asserting wage rights is unlawful, and a retaliation claim is separate from the underlying pay claim. That does not make speaking up easy, which is why it is worth getting advice on sequencing before you do. We handle unpaid wage and overtime claims for workers in New York and New Jersey.
If your pay stub does not show your hours, bring it in and we will look at it with you.
