Work-from-home employees should be paid for the time it takes for their computers to boot up before they can clock in, according to a panel of judges in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The takeaway from the case, according to attorneys at Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP writing in JD Supra, is that employers now “should be more aware of any pre-shift or post-shift duties that employees may need to perform, including booting up their computer to clock in and work.”
The case before the court was brought by employees of a customer service call center in Las Vegas. To do their jobs, workers provided customer service and scheduling to customers over a “soft phone,” operated only through their employer-provided computers, according to court records. The employees alleged that their time booting up and shutting down their computers was an integral and indispensable part of their principal duties, making the time compensable under the Fair Labor Standards Act, as amended by the 1947 Portal-to-Portal Act.
“Generally, the Portal to Portal Act provides that as long as an employee is engaging in activities that are designed to benefit the employer, he or she should be paid for her services regardless of where that work is performed,” according to attorneys at the Employment Law Group.
A lower court ruled that employees did not need to be paid for the time “because starting and turning off employees’ computers to clock in and out was not a principal activity for which the employees were hired,” attorneys at Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP reported in JD Supra.
In its reversal, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judges said that under the FLSA, if employees’ work cannot be performed without turning on their computers, then it is compensable. Turning off computers at the end of the shift, however, was not essential to their work, and therefore, was not time for which they needed to be paid, according to the court.
The Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP attorneys noted that the state of California has its own version of the Portal to Portal Act, “and California courts have repeatedly held that an employer must compensate employees for all time worked.”
