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Several employees in your company regularly work from home in addition to working in the office or other job sites. You know their home-based activities (i.e., logging on to a computer, making business calls, preparing reports) are compensable hours worked. What about your employees’ travel time between their home and the job site?
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Answer: |
Generally, the rule is that time spent commuting to and from work does not count as hours worked and should not figure into overtime pay calculations. The Portal-to-Portal Act says as much, but that law applies only before the principal activities of work begin and after they finish; in other words, only to travel or other work activities outside the workday.
But consider a case where a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that, for overtime-pay purposes, compensable work time for insurance appraisers included both home activities and travel time. When insurance appraisers began and ended the day working at home, they were on the clock when they traveled from home to their first appraisal site of the day and back home at day’s end.
In the appraisers' situation, the morning and evening work at home involved principal activities of their job. The judge said that "principal activities" should be liberally construed, and that they "include any work of consequence performed for an employer, no matter when the work is performed." The work at home was an integral part of the appraisers' responsibilities. Therefore, the workday had begun before the travel and continued afterward. The appraisers worked in the field but the judge’s rationale seems equally applicable to office or production plant personnel.
For appraisers who did not work at home, travel time to the first appraisal site and returning from the last one was not compensable. The time did not have to be counted merely because they carried their laptops, digital cameras and other supplies in their cars. The incidental transporting of light equipment while commuting is not a principal activity that is part of the workday. It may be a different story with heavier equipment that requires some effort to load and transport.
The fact that employees who begin work at home may come into an office or production facility, rather than travel in the field, should not make any difference. The same is true when the employee continues working at home after leaving the office. When the employer authorizes work at home, or expects it and provides employees with the necessary tools, then the home has become an additional job site. The rationale is the same: the travel time occurs after the workday begins or before it ends. Therefore, the time should be compensable.
Source: Dooley v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. (DMass 2004) Dkt No 01-11029-REK |
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