The Department of Labor has created an i-Phone app that allows employees to enter the hours they work and calculate the wages they are owed, including overtime at time and one half their hourly rate. This will allow employees to keep their own time records. In wage hour litigation well kept employee recortds may be sufficient evidence to overcome any presumption in favor of employer time records if there is a discrepancy.

"The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) has developed the six factors below to evaluate whether a worker is a trainee or an employee for purposes of the FLSA:  

1. The training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to what would be given in a vocational school or academic educational instruction;   

2. The training is for the benefit of the trainees;    

3. The trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under their close observation;   

4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded;  

5. The trainees are not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the training period; and   

6. The employer and the trainees understand that the trainees are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training. 

If all of the factors listed above are met, then the worker is a “trainee”, an employment relationship does not exist under the FLSA, and the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime provisions do not apply to the worker.  Because the FLSA’s definition of “employee” is broad, the excluded category of “trainee” is necessarily quite narrow.  Moreover, the fact that an employer labels a worker as a trainee and the worker’s activities as training and/or a state unemployment compensation program develops what it calls a training program and describes the unemployed workers who participate as trainees does not make the worker a trainee for purposes of the FLSA unless the six factors are met."

• For every dollar spent on UI, economic activity increases by two dollars.
• During each quarter of the recent recession, UI benefits kept an average of 1.6 million Americans on the job.
• At the height of the recession, UI benefits averted 1.8 million job losses and kept the unemployment rate approximately 1.2 percentage points lower.
• UI benefits reduced the fall in GDP by 18 percent. Nominal GDP was $175 billion higher in 2009 than it would have been without UI benefits. In total, unemployment insurance kept GDP $315 billion higher from the start of the recession through the second quarter of 2010.

A former chief economist for the DoL does a good job of putting in perspective some conservative talking points about the evil that is organized labor.