Do you ever wonder if your non-exempt employees are sneaking a peek at work e-mail off the clock? Ever suspect their bosses of pressuring them to respond to calls and e-mails after the workday ends?
If those thoughts keep you up at night, it’s time to make sure your employees’ smartphones aren’t putting your organization at risk of violating wage and hour laws.
The proliferation of smartphones has led to a rapidly rising number of lawsuits by employees claiming they were required to work uncompensated on evenings and weekends when not on the clock. The lawsuits are often class actions stemming from overtime-eligible employees using smartphones to extend their workday without those after-hours tasks being compensated.
The problem for employers is that when one employee complains to the Labor Department that they are not being compensated for time working on their smartphones when away from work, the agency’s investigators won’t stop with the complaining employee. They also look at how many others are “similarly situated.”
A single employee’s complaint can turn in to a class action when all the other similarly situated employees are included.
Just a few minutes a day over months or years can add up to financial disaster if an employer has a number of employees regularly using their phones for uncompensated work.
In the last several years, the courts have seen a flood of lawsuits in which groups of employees claim the time they spend reading and responding to e-mail should be considered work time, and therefore paid.
The danger is that when a boss sends a worker a message off-hours and asks them to read something or send an e-mail, the employee will usually feel compelled to do as they’re told, even if they don’t want to. It’s unlikely a subordinate will refuse to a superior for many reasons, such as job security and also advancement possibilities. Who wants to look lazy when the go-getters are the ones who are recognized?
Employees often are expected to check their work e-mail, and it’s not too much of an overstatement to say many employees today are under pressure because they are required to respond to after-hours messages.
You might think that just a few minutes of after-hours work won’t cause a problem because the time is minimal. But when employees sue claiming they should be compensated for after-hours smartphone work, the employer typically uses the de minimis defense.
De minimis means very little, perhaps just a minute or two. The employer maintains that the time spent is de minimis, but it isn’t. Just five minutes a day adds up to almost a half hour a week. But there are precedent-setting court decisions that have said that even 30 minutes extra a week is not de minimis.
Also, besides federal law, you have our own state law to contend with.
Additionally, you may not even know that some employees are checking work e-mail at home whether they’re told to or not.
Just because the employer doesn’t require employees to stay tied to their phones doesn’t eliminate legal risk. The law defines work time as the time an employee is “suffered or permitted” to work.
So, an employer doesn’t have to require employees to answer e-mail and perform other tasks off the clock to run into trouble. Merely permitting that work without counting it as compensable time, puts the employer at risk.
What should you do?
The extension of work time made possible by smartphones and other electronic devices poses a new danger for employers.
To ensure you don’t’ find yourself the target of a wage and hour lawsuit, you need to put in a place a solid policy about non-exempt employees working on their smartphone after hours.
You should put the policy in place, communicate it to your staff in a meeting, as well as include the policy in your employee handbook. Passing out a memo on the matter is also helpful.
Once the policy has been communicated, you have to monitor and survey staff to make sure they are not breaching the rules.
Tags: Leaders' Choice Insurance, Non Exempt Employees, Smartphones, Uncompensated Work, Wage Hour Dilemma