Compensate Travel Between Job Sites

Are you paying your employees for travel between job sites? Learn how the US Supreme Court has reinforced the Department of Labor's interpretation of the Fair Labor Standards Act on travel time.

Transcript

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Big news from the US Supreme Court in regards to travel time. You know, we've had a show on this in the past, and I just wanted to go back and kind of update because this is a recent announcement from October posted in November. But when we talk about the Fair Labor Standard Act, we understand that there are so many questions. You all have brought some really good comments in regards to how do I pay people? Am I paying them correctly? Exempt or non-exempt? Um, 1099 to W-2. But there's always that gray area in in when it comes to wage an hour. And we have said this a million times. You don't fool around with people's pay. You just don't do it. But at the same time, you want to make sure that you're paying people for actual hours worked, or at least for the work that you negotiated for them to come on and do. And I totally get it. So when I saw this posting from a recent decision on travel time, I really thought we ought to just go over it one more time and just give you the reinforcement of what the Supreme Court's basically saying. The question was if an individual is traveling from place to place, now what I mean by that is they go from client to client to client. So think HVAC, think um home nurse, think about um plumbers, electricians, individuals that work on the client's site and they're they're moving, they're traveling between sites all day. It's understood. Nobody's arguing, nobody's challenging the fact that we do not pay individuals to come from their home to the workplace. We don't do it. We're not even going to pay them to go home at night. That's not compensatable time. However, in a number of situations, the question has been, well, what about that gap time? If it takes uh two hours at the first claim and the drive time is we're assuming about 30 minutes to the second appointment. Do we have to pay them for that? Because chances are they're gonna stop and get lunch, they might stop and go to the bank. What what are the rules on that? And you know, I I get it. I in fact, I've even talked to companies about, you know, if they're on the clock, they're they're covered by workers' comp, right? If they're on the clock, even though you don't necessarily know where they are or what they're doing, they're still covered. So if something happens to them in that gap time, if they're on the clock, it's still considered workers' comp. And I've had car accidents. Uh and uh clients call me uh in regards to car accidents where somebody got T-boned in an intersection between the the workplace and an errand that they told them to go out on. And of course, they were on the clock because they were running the errand for the company, but then we found out that the individual had left the route of where that she needed to be to go and pick up lunch at a special place she wanted to go to. So she was returning from there. So it wasn't necessarily workers' comp because she should have been clocked out to do that as a non-exempt employee. Well, the Supreme Court has been very, very clean about this. In fact, they didn't even really want to hear this case. Uh, nursing home care management versus the Department of Labor. And it's a great case, but it's very specific. It's it reminds us that compensatable travel under the FLSA is when employees are traveling between job sites during the workday. And such time also includes toward the 40-hour weekly threshold for overtime. So even that gap time is applied to determining whether a non-exempt employee would get overtime. Now, commuting to and from home or a second job or for personal errands remains non-compensatable. Now, I'm stressing that because when you're talking to your employees, please help them understand you need to stay on the route by which we've given you this client first, then that client, then this stop. That's that's your day. If you're gonna run a personal errand, then you do that on your own time and it will not be compensated. It's gonna take more than 20 minutes, right? At least we assume. So you have the right, and this is where cameras in the in the vehicles, this is where um you're able to monitor the activity of the individual. Because again, for uh insurance purposes, for um just liability issues, you're able to determine where your employee is, where your company vehicle, if it is your company vehicle, where your company vehicle is at all times. It also says that employers should implement reliable systems to track and record record, excuse me, work-related travel time accurately to ensure compliance with the FLSA, minimize potential liability with a special focus on time travel incurred between the start and the end of the employee's work shift. So that means definitely if you want to apply these kinds of recording devices, you can do it. There has to be complete transparency with the employee. They have to be told, okay, we've got this camera in here, we're going to check your mileage. I've got a GPS on your company phone so I know where you are at all times. This is a business decision and it's a it's compliant with business needs. You can't do it just to be doing it. I got a question the other day from someone who uh sent me an email and said, Hey, what do you think if we put GPS on our employees in the production floor? I thought, your your facility isn't that big. Help me understand. I mean, you're not putting cameras, right? And she said, No, no cameras. We just want to know why it's taking so long to do certain tasks. We're we're really struggling with efficiency issues right now. And I thought, well, that's really intriguing. I said, is it just this one individual you're gonna be doing? And she said, no. No, we're gonna actually track all of our management team to determine if they're spending too much time in a certain building or if is it taking too much time to do a certain task. We just want to work on the efficiency aspect. And that's where she's got herself covered. If she can bring it back to the needs of the business, verify what she's gonna do with that information, verify where the information is going to be kept. And when it when when it you know, who will be privy to it, that that's okay. She's allowed to do that. And sometimes, and it doesn't mean forever, because again, this is an efficiency study. But if even when, when it comes to these kind of things, tracking time and travel, you have to remember if they're actually in the process of working, you have to pay them. And on an exempt employee, especially, that is not one of the five things that you can deduct for if they stop and get lunch or if they, you know, uh stop and fill up their vehicle with gas or something while they're in the process of working. So, as with all things, we're going to keep up with all these different questions and different changes that are going on with the big, big topics of wage an hour. So, will there be more coming up here in 2026? Absolutely. And that's our job to help you uh understand what those are. So keep your questions coming in. We love to hear from you. You can talk to us here at the studio, catch me on LinkedIn, or email me directly at PPMore at the Human Resource USA. We're here for you. See you again.