The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has, for the second time, reversed a summary judgment ruling in favor of a defendant that was sued for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act because it refused to compensate employees of a call center for time spent booting up and shutting down their computers, even if that period of time is brief.
The Background: The defendant operates a call center. The agents in the call center use a computer-based timekeeping program and are required to clock in and clock out to keep track of the hours they work. To access the timekeeping system, the employees have to turn on a computer, log in, and open up the program. The plaintiffs say that process can take anywhere from one to 20 minutes, depending on the computer they happen to be sitting at, with an average time of between seven and 12 minutes. At the end of their shift, the employees log out, clock out, and turn off their computers, which can take as long as 15 minutes in some cases.
- The employees filed suit under the Fair Labor Standards Act, arguing they should be paid for the time spent waiting for their computers to turn on and to turn off. A District Court judge granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment, ruling that the time spent turning the computers on and off was not an integral part of the employees’ job because they were not hired for that purpose. Then, the Ninth Circuit overturned that ruling on the grounds that the employees would not be able to do their jobs without turning on their computers.
- The case went back to the District Court and again the District Court ruled in favor of the defendants. The plaintiffs then appealed the ruling back to the Ninth Circuit.
The Ruling: The time spent booting up computers is compensable under the FLSA because it is an “integral and indispensable” part of the employees’ main duties, the Ninth Circuit ruled. The court reasoned that employees cannot perform their primary job functions without a functioning computer.
- The court did not definitively rule on whether shutting down computers is compensable, leaving that for the lower court to determine.
- The “de minimis doctrine,” which allows employers to disregard small amounts of work time as too trivial to track, may still apply in FLSA cases. However, the court found there were factual disputes about whether the computer boot-up time in this case was truly de minimis.
- The court rejected the employer’s argument that it wasn’t liable because employees could request adjustments to their time records. Evidence suggested that supervisors may have only been allowed to adjust time to reflect scheduled start times, not earlier boot-up periods.
- “In sum, [the plaintiffs] raised a genuine issue of material fact as to the question whether [the defendant] allowed employees to be compensated for any time spent before the scheduled start of a shift,” the Ninth Circuit wrote. “As a result, summary judgment was unwarranted on the ground that the plaintiffs failed to establish that [the defendant] did not adjust time when requested.”
