Comission vs. Hourly Employee?

[jomarkop]

North Dakota- My husband was working as a comission paid employee at an autobody shop and being paid by book hours (only get paid for however long a repair guide says it should take to do the job). However, even though he was working 90 hours every two weeks physically, his book hours always dropped below 20 hours because of the types of jobs, which were long term jobs. Because the jobs each covered more than one paycheck, his boss would have to pay my husband for his physical hours put in. His boss would then go back after the job was completed and figure out how far over book hours he had paid my husband and basically bill my husband for those, taking it out of his next paycheck. Becuase of this my husband was never able to catch up on hours when there were 3 or 4 long term jobs in a row. He actually had to ask his boss to make sure every paycheck was at least 500 dollars, just to make our bills, which meant my husband also had to work that off before he could start on his normal hours for the pay period. Needless to say, he never caught up, and when he quit the job, his boss sent him a bill for a thousand dollars worth of work. Interesting thing is though, his paychecks were within 20 dollars of each other in amount for the last year he worked there. What we need is someone to intepret the following section of
the Fair Labor Standards act, which we think applies and therefore makes my husband a wage emplyee instead of a commission employee- but before we can spend a lot of money on a lawyer to fight this, we need to know if we're understanding this right- Here's the part of the Act: A commission rate is not bona fide if the formula for computing the commissions is such that the employee, in fact, always or almost always earns the same fixed amount of compensation for each workweek. (FLSA Section- 29 CFR 779.416) Is this a viable option to save us from havign to pay a thousand dollars to a man who took advantage of his employees?