© 2025 Seyfarth Shaw LLP Massachusetts Wage & Hour Peculiarities, 2025 ed. | 55 working for a hotel may fall within the FLSA’s commissioned inside sales exemption, which does not exist under Massachusetts law, and the state hotel exemption, which exists under Massachusetts but not federal law.298 Determining exempt status can be a difficult task and requires a fact-specific examination of the duties of each individual employee who could potentially qualify as exempt. In the event of litigation, it is an employer’s burden to establish that an employee qualifies for one or more of these exemptions. The Supreme Court recently held that an employer must meet the “preponderance-of-the-evidence standard,” not the heightened “clear-and-convincing-evidence standard,” in order “to show that an employee is exempt from the minimum-wage and overtimepay provisions” of the FLSA.299 An employee’s “job title [or a particular job classification] alone is insufficient to establish the exempt status of an employee.”300 The FLSA includes some exemptions to the overtime laws that are outside of this publication’s Massachusetts law focus.301 A. White Collar Exemptions Under federal law, workers employed in a “bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity” are exempt from the overtime pay requirements.302 The executive, administrative, and professional exemptions are typically referred to as the “white collar exemptions.” While both Massachusetts and federal law exempt other categories of employees from overtime, the whitecollar exemptions are those on which employers most often rely and therefore are also the exemptions that are most often subject to litigation. While the Massachusetts Minimum Fair Wage Law includes the white-collar exemptions for bona fide executive, administrative, and professional employees,303 the statute does not provide definitions for these three categories of employees. The Massachusetts minimum wage regulations, however, provide that “[t]he terms ‘bona fide executive or administrative or professional person’ in [the Massachusetts statute] . . . shall have the same meaning” as those set forth in the federal regulations.304 298 The federal inside sales exemption, 29 U.S.C. § 207(i), is discussed further in Section VI.B.2, and the Massachusetts hotel exemption, M.G.L. ch. 151, § 1A(12), is discussed in Section VI.B.5. 299 EMD Sales, Inc. v. Carrera, 604 U.S. 45, 54 (2025). 300 29 C.F.R. § 541.2. 301 For example, the FLSA exempts certain commissioned inside sales employees, agricultural employees, switchboard operators, and limited-circulation newspaper employees from its overtime provisions. See 29 U.S.C. § 207(i); 29 U.S.C. § 213(a)(6); 29 U.S.C. § 213(a)(8); 29 U.S.C. § 213(a)(10). Massachusetts law does not contain comparable exemptions. 302 29 U.S.C. § 213(a)(1). 303 M.G.L. ch. 151, § 1A(3). 304 454 C.M.R. § 27.03. Additionally, under both Massachusetts and federal law, certain highly compensated individuals who perform at least some of the duties of an administrative, executive, or professional employee are also exempt. 29 C.F.R. § 541.601. The exemption for highly compensated employees is discussed further in Section V.A.4. Prior to implementation of the regulations, courts still looked to federal law in interpreting this statute. See Goodrow, 432 Mass. at 170 (holding that in the absence of statutory definitions of exemptions, “we may look to interpretations of analogous Federal statutes for guidance, . . . but
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