A city employee must be paid for off-duty hours time spent attending weekly counseling sessions which were recommended as a condition of her continued employment. The U.S. Court of Appeals recently affirmed this ruling in a case involving the City of Aurora, Illinois.
Kari Sehie worked as an emergency dispatcher for the city; her primary duty was to field 911 calls. At the end of one eight-hour shift, she was instructed to stay and work another shift because a co-worker was sick. Sehie protested. A half-hour into the new shift she became very angry and upset because she was working another shift and abruptly left work. When Sehie returned to work, she reported the absence as a work-related injury.
Aurora required Sehie to submit to a fitness for duty evaluation as a result of her leaving work during a shift. The physician who performed the evaluation said that Sehie was fit for duty, but recommended as a condition of her continued employment that she attend weekly psychotherapy for six months. The City of Aurora adopted the recommendation and ordered Sehie to see its therapist outside of her regularly scheduled work hours. Sehie requested to see her own therapist, whom she had frequently consulted with, but the city refused the request. Sehie attended 16 sessions with the city’s therapist, spending an hour at each session plus two hours traveling back and forth by car. The city paid for 90 percent of the cost of each counseling session.
Sehie sued Aurora under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) claiming that the city should also have paid her for the time she spent attending and commuting back and forth to the counseling sessions because this time was beyond her normal forty-hour work week. The district court ruled in favor of Sehie, concluding that the time she spent attending and traveling to and from the counseling sessions was compensable under the FLSA.
On appeal, the city argued that the counseling sessions were not compensable time because the treatment was primarily for the benefit of Sehie, not the employer, because the counseling sessions minimized the prospect that she would again abandon her job and lose her job as a result. The court of appeals disagreed with the city’s contention, finding that attendance at the sessions was a mandatory condition of Sehie’s continued employment and that the purpose of the required counseling sessions was to enable Sehie to perform her job duties and relate to co-workers more effectively (Sehie was known to have had several "frictional" episodes with others on the job), which benefited the city.
The appeals court did emphasize that its ruling was very fact-specific and did not mean that "every time an employer gets help for its employees, the employee must be compensated for hours worked."
