Overtime Lawyer Blog

In order to know if the time you spend at work might be classified as overtime by the FLSA, you have to know how work time itself is defined. The FLSA language defining what constitutes work itself is vague enough, though, that each situation probably has to be figured out on a case-by-case basis.

For instance, in the 2005 US Supreme Court case of IBP Inc v Alvarez, the Court ruled that the time that employees spend walking to their production area after putting on required work gear is compensable. The time spent waiting to take the work gear off also is compensable. However, the time spent waiting to put the first piece of gear on before starting work is not compensable.

But all of this can be changed under a union or employee contract, if you’re under one, so, as always, make sure you read your employment contract carefully under any and all circumstances.

Continue reading " How Do You Define "Work Time" Anyway? " »

Ever make a work- related call or send an email from your Smartphone when you weren’t actually “on the clock”? Most people seem to be doing that these days, especially in busy Atlanta.

You may very well be entitled to overtime pay for those activities, under some circumstances, as a new term has just leaped into the legal lexicon in the last few months—“BlackBerry Overtime,” currently used to describe work- related, electronic communications activities done from remote communication devices outside of official work time.

This is a very new area of the law, but it may be one that is about to get bigger. Employers often ask employees to run errands and do favors outside of regular work hours without compensation. The advent of continual emailing can only make that problem worse.

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Information technology workers are notoriously overworked. They put in long hours, field endless emergency calls in and out of regular hours, get no credit when things go well and take the blame when anything goes wrong. Moderns cities like Atlanta have more than their share of IT workers.

But because of an often- misunderstood FLSA computer worker exemption form overtime pay, IT workers are often shut out of overtime that they are actually entitled to. This exemption has become the subject of discussion boards among the computer literate, and IT workers have been suing their companies, and winning, for denied overtime.

Employers often misinterpret a very narrow FLSA overtime exemption that applies to some computer workers, specifically exempting from overtime pay employees who are involved in the application of systems analysis techniques, or who develop or design software or operating systems, or perform related functions.

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One side issue that often arises in talking about overtime is travel time. The FLSA has some guidelines on when an employee's time spent travelling is compensable. When is it considered to be overtime, and when it is travelling from Atlanta to Marietta considered to be all in a days' work?

For the most part, time spent travelling from your home to your job, no matter how far, is on the employee and is not compensable. The one exception to this rule is if the employee has been called back to work for an emergency or on a special assignment. Then, compensable time includes all of the travel time from home to work and back.

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