DOL Guidance for Tracking Remote Worker’s Compensable Time

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

On August 24, 2020, the U.S. Division of Labor (“DOL”) issued Subject Help Bulletin No. 2020-5 (“FAB 2020-5” or the “Bulletin”) in an effort to information an rising variety of employers confronted with the problem of monitoring compensable hours labored by teleworking non-exempt staff. Particularly, FAB 2020-5 presents readability concerning how, and to what extent, employers should monitor the variety of hours labored by non-exempt staff who work remotely. As many workforces appear poised to proceed partial or full telework for the stability of the 12 months, FAB 2020-5 supplies helpful perception to help employers in correctly monitoring distant hours and avoiding legal responsibility for unpaid wages.

FLSA Compensation Necessities for Unscheduled Work

The Bulletin affirms the Truthful Labor Requirements Act’s (“FLSA”) requirement that employers compensate staff for all hours labored, together with work that’s “not requested, however suffered or permitted,” no matter whether or not the work takes place on the employer’s premises or elsewhere. If an employer “is aware of or has cause to consider that the work is being carried out, [it] should rely the time as hours labored.” Below the FLSA, it’s the employer’s obligation to train management to make sure that work it doesn’t want to be carried out is just not undertaken. FAB 2020-5 upholds this obligation, including that “[e]mployers should . . .pay for all work they find out about, even when they didn’t ask for the work, even when they didn’t need the work accomplished, and even when they’d a rule in opposition to doing the work.”

The Bulletin additionally confirms the longstanding rule that an employer can not keep away from fee obligations for unapproved work by merely issuing a rule banning it; as an alternative, it “should make each effort to implement” that rule. Nonetheless, as FAB 2020-5 additionally notes, an employer’s obligation to stop unscheduled work is just not “boundless,” and that an employer might not be obligated to compensate non-exempt staff for hours labored that it had no precise or constructive data of and thus no alternative to stop. Below the FLSA, an employer could have “constructive” data of unscheduled hours labored if the employer “ought to have acquired data of such hours by way of affordable diligence.”

FAB 2020-5’s Steering

FAB 2020-5 means that a technique employers would possibly train such “affordable diligence” for teleworking staff is to ascertain a “affordable course of” for workers to report uncompensated work time, with out implicitly or overtly discouraging correct worker reporting. Importantly, the Bulletin states that if staff fail to make use of this course of to report unscheduled hours, employers are usually not obligated to undertake additional investigation to “uncover” unreported hours. For instance, employers with a way for reporting unpaid work are usually not required to moreover search teleworking worker log-on information or e-mail timestamps to be able to suss out unscheduled and unreported work hours. As a substitute, as FAB 2020-5 notes, an worker’s failure to comply with affordable procedures for reporting unscheduled time “thwarts” an employer’s skill to stop undesirable work, and the employer’s failure to compensate the worker for that point doesn’t violate the FLSA.

With the Bulletin’s steerage in thoughts, employers ought to ensure that to think about the next key takeaways whereas managing a distant non-exempt workforce:

Do not forget that employers are required to trace and pay for hours labored by these staff no matter the place it happens.

Employers ought to examine and tackle situations of unauthorized work, although employers should you’ll want to comply with FAB 2020-5’s steerage and compensate staff for all hours labored (even undesirable hours) that they do or ought to find out about. Non-exempt staff who repeatedly work with out permission could doubtlessly be disciplined, however they often might not be unpaid.

Whereas distant workforce creates distinctive challenges, employers are well-served to guard themselves by implementing processes to make sure immediate and correct reporting of all hours labored, together with unscheduled time, for all staff.

As you might be conscious, issues are altering rapidly and there’s no clear-cut authority or shiny line guidelines. This isn’t an unequivocal assertion of the regulation, however as an alternative represents our greatest interpretation of the place issues at present stand. This text doesn’t tackle different the potential impacts of the quite a few different native, state and federal orders which were issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, together with, with out limitation, potential legal responsibility ought to an worker grow to be sick, necessities concerning household depart, sick pay and different points.