08.10.09
Smart Phone at Time and a Half
Your employer gives you a smart phone. You carry it with you, making yourself accessible 24/7. You respond to a couple of emails and texts. It all seems simple enough.
But how much time should your employer pay you? Did the smart phone put you over 40 hours for the week? Those are the issues beginning to unravel in the courts.
Excerpt:
Last month, three current and former employees sued T-Mobile USA Inc., claiming they were required to use company-issued smart phones to respond to work messages after hours without pay. In a March suit, a former CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. maintenance worker seeks pay for time spent after hours receiving and responding to messages on a work-issued cellphone.
The federal Fair Labor Standards Act says employees must be paid for work performed off the clock, even if the work was voluntary. When the law was passed in 1938, “work” was easy to define for hourly employees. As the workplace changed, so did the rules for when workers should be paid.
In the T-Mobile case, current and former employees say they were required to use company-issued smart phones to respond to work-related messages, including customer complaints, after hours without pay. When the workers reported the hours to management of the cellphone company, the lawsuit says, the employees were told nothing could be done and they should expect to work extra hours as part of T-Mobile’s “standard business practices.”
