compensability

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Employers (and thus courts) continue to be confronted with private litigation and DOL rulemaking seeking to expand the scope of wage-and-hour liabilities, such as expanding the definition of employee, seeking to narrow the scope of a longstanding exemption or expanding the definition of what constitutes compensable work. Rejecting a claim based on the…

Per FLSA regulations, break periods between 5 to 20 minutes generally are considered compensable.  29 C.F.R. § 785.18.  While state wage-and-hour laws typically borrow extensively from the FLSA’s regulatory framework, a new decision from a Missouri Federal Judge highlights that many of the vagaries of state law are unsettled or unclear, rejecting Plaintiffs’ motion for…

The issue of whether time spent “on-call” is compensable under the Fair Labor Standards Act is a factual analysis, and thus the source of FLSA litigation.  A recent decision finding such time to be non-compensable highlights a preeminent principle in the analysis – in order for on-call time to be non-compensable, an employee must be…

The Supreme Court agreed today to hear a case involving application of the Portal-to-Portal Act to employees who claim they should be compensated for time spent undergoing security screenings used to prevent employee theft.  Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, Case No. 13-433.   The employees allege they were required to undergo security screenings to…

In another setback for unionized non-exempt FLSA plaintiffs claiming as compensable time spent: 1) changing into work-related gear; and 2) traveling to their site of work from the changing point (typically in a production facility such as a factory or slaughterhouse), the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has ruled that U.S. Steel was…

Ascertaining the actual “hours worked” by a plaintiff alleging uncompensated working time is one of a factfinder’s most thankless tasks, requiring the judge or jury to apply prevailing law regarding what constitutes compensable “work” to conflicting testimony regarding when, where and how the plaintiff performed that work, and how much work the plaintiff performed. Such determinations…

The proliferation of FLSA lawsuits brought by “non-exempt” employees for alleged uncompensated working time has highlighted several important FLSA questions. One prominent and thorny question concerns when and how an employer is deemed to have constructive knowledge of work allegedly performed by an employee, such that the employer will be deemed to have “suffered or permitted&rdquo…

An ongoing issue in wage and hour litigation is the compensability of changing time – the time spent putting on and removing garments and protective material related to the performance of an employee’s duties. Earlier this month, the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed the District Court’s grant of summary judgment to defendant in…