Greg McGillivary
Thu, 11/11/2021
A federal appellate court has ruled that call center employees are entitled to be paid for time spent logging on, booting up and downloading software on their computers, even if these activities take only a minute or two. The case involved a student loan provider whose call center employees are responsible for answering individuals’ questions about their student loans.
In Peterson v. Nelnet Diversified Sols, LLC, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled that the use of a computer is an activity that is integral and indispensable to the job of call center employees because they cannot perform their work without the use of the computers and the software that they download. The court found that the computers are a piece of equipment that is indispensable to the employees’ work.
The court specifically found that even though the preshift activities took only one to two minutes a day, the employer must pay for this time. The court noted that his resulted in ae loss of $2.40 of pay per week for the employees, and over the course of a year this resulted in a loss of over $100 in pay. Further, the court explained that it was administratively easy for the company to calculate the time spent performing the activities of preparing the computer for the workday.
The decision is significant as it rejects a common employer argument to try and steal money from workers by claiming that the amount of time for which the workers are seeking to be paid is “de minimis.” Instead, the court found that employers must pay employees for any amount of time that can be ascertained through estimates or on the clock. Employers are not entitled to simply steal employees time and not pay for it by claiming it’s too small to worry about.
If you work in a job in which you are performing pre-shift or post-shift work without compensation, please contact us at info@mselaborlaw.com.
