• Indiana employers may force employees to work overtime, with a few exceptions.dollars image by Andreescu Dragos from Fotolia.com
  
  Although doing so may lower morale in the workplace, many employers in the United States can legally force their employees to work overtime, which is any amount of time after the end of a shift, as well as any number of hours beyond the standard work week of 40 hours per week. No federal laws prevent employers from doing this, and Indiana has no state laws in place to prevent it.
  
  

Required Hours

• In Indiana, as in most states, employers must pay their workers 1.5 times the normal pay rate for all hours worked beyond the standard 40 hours per week. An employer may also force employees to work those overtime hours -- if employees refuse, then an employer has the legal right to fire them. These compelled hours may also happen without warning, as Indiana law does not require advanced notice for mandatory overtime.
  
  

Exempt Employees

• Many types of employees are exempt from overtime law in Indiana, including employers with one employee, people under 16, salespeople working for commission, members of a religious order, executives with the power to fire employees, and others. These peoples work long or irregular hours by the nature of their job, and so overtime does not apply to them. Because overtime doesn't exist in their case, neither does mandatory overtime.
  
  

Nursing

• According to Sandra Fights, former president of the Indiana State Nurses Association, mandatory overtime is particularly prevalent among nurses in Indiana, where employers use it to compensate for staffing shortages. While 13 states have banned mandatory overtime, Indiana is not one of them, and it remains a controversial policy in the field of nursing due to quality of care concerns.