Paul DeCamp, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC office, was quoted in the Washington Post, in “South Korea Is Dropping Its Maximum Workweek to 52 Hours. There Is No Federal Limit in the United States.” by Jena McGregor.

Following is an excerpt:

South Korea’s parliament is putting a lid on what an official there has called its “inhumanely long” work hours, passing a bill that would cut the maximum workweek from 68 hours down to 52. In doing so, it is setting the limit right around where research has shown that health conditions start worsening and productivity starts falling off.

South Koreans worked an average 2,069 hours in 2016, more than any country in the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development other than Mexico and Costa Rica. The new bill would limit weekly hours to the regular 40 hours per week and permit up to 12 hours of overtime and include weekend hours in that tally, paid at an overtime rate of 50 to 100 percent additional pay, according to Bloomberg. …

Some state regulations do require having one day’s rest in seven, or a number of hours off between shifts. But “as far as I know, no state or locality has specified a maximum number of hours that an employer may ask an employee to work as a matter of generally applicable law,” said Paul DeCamp, a former administrator of the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division and now an attorney with Epstein Becker Green in Washington.

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