EMPLOYEES MUST BE PAID FOR ALL WORK DONE BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER THEIR SHIFTS
Every employee has a core job comprised of the main duties the employee is hired to perform. And just about every job has non-core elements that take up time and (often) seem unproductive—organizing or maintaining tools, putting on protective clothing, cleaning or picking up after work, or attending meetings. Do employees need to be compensated when they are not really working?
Unfortunately, as one Arizona construction company recently found, it doesn’t matter if the actions are not what the company considers “productive.” If an employer requires employees to do something, and the time spent doing it is more than de minimus, that’s work, and nonexempt employees must be compensated for it. Also, time records have to be accurate, and reflect their tasks as working time.
Arizona Pipeline Co. does what its name says: it installs pipelines and other underground utilities. It was not paying its employees for time spent before or after their shifts, loading and unloading materials and supplies, cleaning equipment, etc. They were also not paid for traveling from the company’s location to job sites, or for time spent attending required meetings. As a result, Arizona Pipeline Co. will pay $750,000 in back wages for pre-shift and post-shift work, travel, and meetings for which its employees were not compensated.
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, employees must be paid for all work time—even for time spent performing tasks that the company does not consider to be productive. Basically, if the only reason employees are engaged in a particular tasks, is because a manager told them to do it, that’s probably work. Non-exempt employees must be paid for that time, and paid overtime for their tasks of they performed after the employee has already reached the 40-hour threshold for the workweek.
