Employers needn’t pay for sure journey time between workplace, telework places, DOL says

Diving letter:

• An employee who teleworks part of the day and works part of the day in an office and who has enough time to do personal tasks in between, does not have to be compensated for the travel time The US Department of Labor’s Payroll Department (DOL) communicated between the two locations in one of two opinion letters published December 31.
• The letter gave two examples. In one case, the employee leaves the office at lunchtime to attend a parent-teacher conference and is allowed to work from home for the rest of the day. In the other case, the employee is given permission to work from home before attending a doctor’s appointment, before working at her regular office location for the rest of the day.
• According to DOL, the travel time in both scenarios would not be a compensable time according to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), since the employee in the scenarios is either off duty or commutes normally. Travel time would also not count as compensable “site-to-site trip”, nor would it count as compensable time under the FLSA’s Continuous Workplace Doctrine, the agency said.

Dive Insight:

The FLSA specifies that the periods in which insured employees are released from duty and which are long enough to allow the employee to use the time “effectively for” [the employee’s] own purposes ” do not count as hours worked according to the law.

Although travel time under the FLSA “must be counted as hours worked” when time is part of an employee’s main activity, the employee described in the scenarios in the December 31 letter travels voluntarily for her own purposes during her absence. Service time, “said DOL.

However, DOL noted that some court rulings analyzing situations where employees may need to do work immediately before commuting to or immediately after commuting from a construction site “appear to be the opposite”. The employer addressed in the opinion letter stated that the employee is not obliged in the scenarios to carry out her work at a specific point in time.

The letter is the latest in a series of DOL documents dealing with remote working. Earlier this week, the agency released guidelines that employers can meet their posting obligations under the FLSA or Family and Medical Leave Act by electronic booking under certain circumstances. In August, the agency’s on-site support bulletin detailed whether an employer had to pay workers to work remotely if the employer has rules against it do certain jobs remotely.

A second opinion, published on December 31, addressed an employer’s question Overtime payments to caregivers who work in the dormitory and have longer shifts of 24 hours or more.