Wage and Hour

Larry · March 2002

If a person in a proper managerial or supervisory postion tell an hourly production to go to another location and work for the day, is that person's travel time on the clock. Example: Our plant manager instructed two of our FLSA hourly production employees to report to the other Company plant to work for the day assembling some shelving. The employee had already clocked in at his regular job. The other plant is 12 miles from the plant where he normally works. He drove to the other plant in his own vehicle and worked for the day as instructed and clocked out at the other plant at the end of the day. No overtime was accrued. QUESTION: I was told by the plant manager's secretary that these employees should clock out for liability purposes and then clock in at their new work site. This makes no sense to me since the employees are FLSA nonexempt. Their travel time to their new work area is fully complensated at their regular rate of pay since they were already working at their regular location and was then told by the supervisor to go to the new work site and work for the remainder of the day. What advantage or purpose would be served by having them clock out at their regular work site prior to departure and clocking in at the new site upon arrival. If they had an accident on the way to the new work site, the company would be liable anyway would we not since competent management instructed them to go to the new work site and management knew that they would be using their own vehicle to travel to the new work site. WHAT AM I MISSING??

Down_the_Middle · March 2002

Unfortunately the Plant Mgr's sec'y is dabbling in an area that he/she knows little about. Travel during the regular work day IS viewed as hours worked and your example is a classic example of what the law requires. Those travel hours are compensable as hours worked.

Margaret Morford · March 2002

I suspect that she's worried about whether the company would be responsible for a car accident if the employee were to have one between plants. Your insurance carrier and/WC laws would govern.

Margaret Morford
theHRedge
615-371-8200
[email]mmorford@mleesmith.com[/email]
[url]http://www.thehredge.net[/url]

santire · March 2002

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 03-29-02 AT 10:20AM (CST)[/font][p]You are missing nothing. In fact you really have it all together as to the situation you posed and your handling of it. First of all, per the portal to portal act, going from one work location to another is clearly compensable time for a nonexempt employee and insistence that the employee clock out to do so is violation of the law if done with the intent to deny pay for that time. As to the liability issue, whether someone clocks out or not is totally irrelevant. While the whole question of potential liability for an employer during that travel time is quite complex, the basic idea is that the employee - nonexempt or even exempt - is traveling on behalf of the employer and is, in fact, an employee of the employer. The big problem here is that the person that gave you the advice is clearly not a lawyer but is engaged in doing a lawyer's work and very badly at that since their advice is not just wrong but dangerous from a liability perspective.

Wage and Hour

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