The FLSA is the Fair Labor Standards Act.  It's a federal statute that governs payment of wages and payment of overtime wages, among other things, for employees across the country, including here in New Jersey.  The statute guarantees that employees are to be paid a certain minimum wage – it happens to be the same minimum wage that we have in New Jersey – for all hours that they work.

The statute also requires that for certain employees, known as non-exempt employees, that they receive overtime payments for all hours that the employee works in excess of 40 in a week, overtime generally being defined as one and one-half times the regular hourly rate you receive.

If your rights under the FLSA have been violated you have the right to not only sue your employer to recover the overtime wages, or in rare instances the under minimum wages that you haven't received, the statute also gives you the right to pursue those claims on behalf of other people who are in a similar situation.  The statute also will provide a payment of attorney's fees should you prevail against your employer under an FLSA case.  

The statute also will give you the right to recover what are called liquidated damages in most cases.  Liquidated damages are essentially a doubling of whatever money a court determines that your employer owes you.  The liquidated damage amount will be equal to that.  It is a way of not punishing the employer so much as repairing the loss of the use of those wages to you during the time that you should have received them but didn't.