Supreme Court to Decide When
Compensable Time Begins
Decision
could have significant impact in some industries
How
businesses compensate their employees for pre-work or start-up time
could be affected by a recent ruling by the Department of Labor
regarding call-in centers and by an expected decision by the U.S.
Supreme Court regarding when meatpacking plants must begin paying their
employees as they start the workday.
The
Department of Labor determined recently that workers at a call-center
must be paid for the time spent powering up their computers, linking to
the network and opening necessary software programs to perform their
duties. The DOL ruled that Humana must pay over $1 million in back pay
to employees because the time spent on start-up activities at their
computer workstations is considered work time and is compensable.
In the
meatpacking cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has already heard oral
arguments and will rule sometime in the upcoming months on the question
of whether workers must be compensated for the time it takes to don
protective gear and walk to a workstation. In two recent cases, one
from the east coast and one from the west, lower courts made conflicting
rulings on this issue of whether donning and doffing protective gear and
the time it then took to get to a workstation was compensable time under
the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
The
court's decision will turn on its reading of the FLSA as amended by the
Portal-to-Portal Act. Under the
FLSA, employers must pay employees for all "hours worked." The
threshold question is whether the employees' activities- donning and
doffing, waiting and walking - constitute "work" under the FLSA.
Employers generally do not have to compensate employees for traveling
to a work site or for preliminary activities of a given job unless those
activities are an "integral or indispensable" part of the job.
In one of the cases
before the Supreme Court, involving IBP workers in Washington State, the
lower court ruled that the employees had to be paid from the moment they
began putting on their protective gear required for the job until they
took off the gear. The other case being considered involves chicken
processing plant workers in Maine. There the lower court found that
employees did not have to be paid for time spent waiting to begin work
after donning their protective gear because they had not yet started the
principal activities of their job.
The question posed
in these two cases is when a compensable act is first performed and
whether or not an employer must begin paying when the first compensable
act occurs. Once special work gear is put on, is any walking or waiting
time which occurs after that compensable? The Department of Labor
generally takes the position that such acts
trigger compensation for the entire workday, even if a worker has to
walk 10 minutes to get to a workstation or sit for a period of time
until his or her shift begins.
The
high court's ultimate decision could have implications much broader than
those on the meatpacking industry. The court's findings could affect
countless different industries in which employers must pass out
information or distribute work equipment well before work activities
actually begin. If the court determines that this walking and waiting
time is compensable, employers may need to change their production
activities and work schedules to control their costs. Many plants have
long walks from employee locker rooms to work stations, so a ruling that
walking to the workstation after donning protective gear is compensable
time would affect the bottom line of these employers.
For
more information, please contact your HR-OneSource Consultant or Dave
Hansen -- 515.221.1718 or hansend@hr-onesource.com
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