Non-exempts and volunteering

GLC · March 2003

We have a non-exempt employee who wants to gain some experience in one of our programs and wants to volunteer. It was my understanding that all non-exempts have to be paid for all time worked when the work benefits the company. Any comments on this?

Whirlwind · March 2003

My FLSA handbook says that exempts can volunteer for their employer if the work is truly voluntary and is not the same type of work they normally do for pay. This comes up for me when staff want to volunteer for student activities outside of their regular working hours. If, for example, the person is a secretary we say yes; if they're a teacher or a child care worker we say no, because they normally work with students.

The citation my handbook gives is 29 USC 203(e)(4)(A) -- but I'm not sure if that's still up to date.

Hope this helps

System · March 2003

We had a similar situation here. The cashiers in our store wanted to spruce up the registers by painting them and offered to volunteer to paint them overnight.
Management quickly accepted (of course) but my gut told me to check it out. I was primarily concerned with someone getting injured off the clock. There could be fumes etc.
I finally contacted my legal counsel and he advised me that even if the staff was gung ho on doing the project there could be one or two who felt that they HAD to volunteer in order to keep their jobs and that other companies had suffered lawsuits over this. Apparently even the appearance of volunteering puts companies at risk
Of course they went ahead and did it anyway. Sigh.

David Nagle VA · March 2003

Generally, if an employer "suffers" the work of an employee, the employee has "worked" for the employer and must be compensated. If that pushes the amount of time worked over 40 hours in a week, there will be an entitlement to overtime compensation. If the employee is working, you also get the protection afforded to you by the workers compensation acts. So the best advice is to pay employees for work. After all, if it makes the employee a better worker, the employer gets benefit from it. You should be sure it occurs during a non-overtime week, and that even with the time in this other job, the total of hours actually worked remains under 40 hours, to keep the cost down.

Having said that, as a practical matter, if it is a single employee, who wants to do something for a few hours, and sincerely wants to volunteer, it is unlikely that the employee will complain, or that DOL would initiate an audit over a report of a single incident (as opposed, for example, to what would happen if they got wind of a practice of doing this).

Non-exempts and volunteering

Comments