Wage Issues? Tip #7: Use a Date Calculator to Help With Calculations of Deadlines and/or Unpaid Wages

This post continues my series of tips, or things to consider, for workers with unpaid wages.

Tip #7 is this: use a date calculator to help with calculations of deadlines and/or unpaid wages.

For years, I have used a website date calculator, like this one, to help me calculate legal deadlines (statutes of limitations) and/or unpaid wages.

A date calculator website lets you (1) enter a start date (e.g. “5/1/2011”) and (2) enter a number of days (e.g. “300 days”), and then the website calculates the end date following that number of days (e.g. “2/15/12” is the date 300 days after 5/1/2011).

This function can be a handy tool when calculating the deadline for a legal claim. For example, certain discrimination- and retaliation- based legal claims relating to unpaid wages have a 300-day deadline. (Please note that deadlines vary for different situations, and an attorney could evaluate applicable deadlines for the particular legal claims that may apply to a given situation).

If an attorney advised a 300-day legal deadline applied to a particular legal claim, a worker could use the wage-calculation function above to enter the date of the event at issue– e.g. a 5/1/2011 retaliatory job-termination of a worker fired for complaining about unequal pay based on gender– and the date calculator website will figure out the legal deadline date occurring 300 days after that initial event date.

Another helpful function of a date calculator website is to let you enter (1) a start date and (2) an end date, and then the website calculates the number of days between the dates.

This function can be helpful in figuring out how many weeks a worker was underpaid wages, and estimating the total unpaid wages over that time.

For example, if a worker estimates he was underpaid about $200/week between 4/12/2010 and 2/10/2011, he can use the website to calculate the total number of underpaid weeks and estimated unpaid wages at issue.

The worker can use a regular calculator to divide the 304 days by 7 days, which results in approximately 43 weeks. The 43 weeks can then be multiplied by $200/week (the estimate weekly unpaid wages above), and the total unpaid wage estimate in this example would be $200/wk x 43 wks = $8,600.

In sum, a date calculator can avoid the human time, risk and error that can be involved in counting a large number of calendar days, and can be a useful tool (along with a regular calculator, and legal advice about applicable deadlines) in calculating legal deadlines and/or estimated unpaid wages.