Sophia Serrao
Thu, 11/10/2022
In 2018, workers employed by a call center sued, alleging that their employer failed to pay them overtime as required by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and state law for the time they spent booting up and turning off their computers after they logged into and out of the company’s time keeping system. The workers are a collective of call center employees who provide customer services and scheduling over a phone network operated through their employer-provided computers.
A trial court in Nevada dismissed the plaintiffs’ case, concluding that their activities did not constitute compensable work. In Cadena, et al. v. Customer Connexx, Inc., et al., a unanimous three-judge panel in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed and remanded the district court’s summary judgment against the workers. The Court said that the time workers spent booting up their employer-provided computers is compensable work time under the Portal-to-Portal Act as it is integral and indispensable to their work activities.
The Portal-to-Portal Act amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to exclude the time workers spend traveling to and from their work activities or time they spend on certain preliminary or postliminary activities from compensable work. Since the Portal-to-Portal Act’s implementation, courts have defined compensable work activities as those that are “integral and indispensable” to the employees’ principal work activities. The Court here agreed with the district court that the workers’ principal duties were answering customer phone calls and scheduling pickups. However, the Court emphasized that the question in the case was whether starting the computer led the call center workers to be able to perform their work, rather than the timekeeping system itself. The Court reasoned that because the workers needed to have a functional computer to complete their principal duties, turning on said computer is integral and indispensable to their principal activities. The Court said that “the employees’ duties cannot be performed without turning on and booting up their work computers, and having a functioning computer is necessary before employees can receive calls and schedule appointments.” The Court, in a footnote, noted that their decision only focused on the pre-shift booting up of the computer, and not the shutting down of the computer post-shift. They left those questions to be answered by the lower court on remand.
MSE has a long history of fighting for workers to be paid correctly for their work. If you feel like you have not been paid correctly or for all your work time, contact us.
