I am a salaried (exempt) employee working in state government in Florida under a Preparedness grant for Bioterrorism. Recently we had grant dollars approved to pay my team overtime for additional hours being worked for H1N1 response and it was approved by various members of management including my division director. Typically I work 50+ hours a week. Since we had OT approved and I signed a form for dual employment to pay me under a 2nd position, I have been working 70-80 hours a week with the understanding I would be paid. This has been going on for over a month. Today we were informed that since we were preparedness employees we could not be paid in this fashion. It seems deceptive to me to offer overtime pay to get more work out of an employee and then when they work it to tell them they can't be paid.

On top of this, I have responded to 2 recruiters in the last month with pay ranges based on anticipated earnings with my current job which may now be inaccurate. Given my normal rate of pay, even if only considering the hours I have worked and submitted up to this point, this is a shortage of roughly 5,000.00 not to mention future earnings that I would have made in the next months.

We are also employees that are abused under a "subject to call" vs "oncall" provision where we do not get oncall pay because they classiffy us as "subject to call" yet are expected to respond 24/7/365 and must monitor a Blackberry at all times, respond to emergency alerts at any time, etc. I have lost track of the times where I was expected to wake at 3am on a saturday because I got a phone call or email, drive 2 hours to a site and fix a firewall or restore power to a site for no compensation, while other teams that are classified differently are paid for "oncall" for time worked outside of normal hours. In fact, poor response after hours is something that can reflect on performance appraisals.

Is this whole situation legal? What recourse do I have?

And just now I hear that management shredded all the forms we signed. I requested a copy and was denied.

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