The Razorback state, Arkansas, has its very own overtime laws that we should cover while we’re looking at how overtime laws are quite different all around the Union. As with many of the overtime laws that I’ve brought up so far, and will surely cover in the future, Arkansas’ overtime law has some striking similarities with other state laws.
First and foremost, Arkansas’ law provides that no employer should make their employees work a week that lasts longer than 40 work hours. Well, they can work their employees longer than that, as long as they pay them one and a half times their normal wages for every hour, minute, and second over 40. This is pretty standard stuff that we’ve seen before in other states, and in fact matches the federal Hour and Wage Law.
Now come the differences, though. In Arkansas, you used to be exempt from the overtime law as it stood normally, for instance, if you were a hotel, tourist attraction, restaurant, or similar establishment and did not bring in more than $500,000 in annual sales volume.
In that case, you only had to start to pay overtime rates if your employees worked more than 44 hours from July 1, 1991, to July 1, 1992. After July 1, 1992, however, these employees would get the normal overtime rate after working more than 40 hours per week.
To this day, though, agricultural workers do not get overtime pay in Arkansas. This exception in Arkansas gets mention in two subsections of their overtime law. The first specifically mentions the 1.5 times pay rate, and how farmers don’t get it. The second similar provision says that no sections of the overtime law can be shown to mean that agricultural workers get extra pay for working more than 40 hours a week. We’ve seen that in other states as well, and it shows the value that farmers still have in this Great Land.
Arkansas overtime laws can be found on the Arkansas Complete Labor Law poster encompassing both the state and federal labor laws.
