Something You Don’t See Every Day
Posted on 14-Apr-08 by The Timekeeper
From the Northwest Arkansas News, an unusual story out of Fayetteville.
Apparently, 14 city workers in the Water and Sewer billing department have been arriving for work 10 minutes early every day so they can have their computers on, their cash drawers ready and be fully prepared to start taking payments from the public at the official office opening time of 8:00am.
Although they were required to arrive at work at 7:50am, the employees all wrote 8:00am as their starting time on their timesheets because they considered they weren’t “at work” until 8:00am. And, of course, as the time never appeared on their timesheets, none of them were paid for the extra 10 minutes each morning.
Melissa Leflar is the human resources division manager for the city of Fayetteville. When she accidentally learned about the situation through a conversation about an unrelated matter, she decided proactively to look in to the wage and hour implications of the practice.
Note that none of the employees had complained, much less filed a lawsuit or anything.
Leflar discovered because the employees were required to come in early to prepare their workstations, the law says the city should be paying them for those 10 minutes — except that the city also uses “rounding” rules that count time in 15-minute increments, meaning that each employee was owed for 15 minutes of additional pay per day.
(Depending on whether the employee worked a full day and a 40 hour week, the additional pay could be at the time-and-a-half overtime rate or the employee’s regular hourly rate.)
And here’s the unusual part. Despite the fact that no employees have complained, the city is paying up. Fifteen minutes per day, five days a week, going back two years. They’re combing through their records so they can take into account which employees were working which days at what rates of pay, and factoring in changes in personnel, pay-rate changes, vacation days and sick days.
They’re even going back and trying to reconstruct who stayed after official closing time at 5:00pm to take care of last-minute callers or walk-in customers. According to city officials, that’s a bit trickier. All the 14 employees rotate among the business office, call center and cashier window — and they don’t have records of which specific employees were working a specific position on any given day. But they’re giving it the old college try.
“Anytime we’re guesstimating, we’re erring in favor of the employee,” Leflar is quoted as saying.
Thank goodness for them it’s only 14 people, or this could be a huge headache. Sounds like at least a medium-sized headache even as it is.
Estimates are it will cost the city of Fayetteville $30,000 (maybe more) to settle up with the employees.
After constant bombardment with stories of employers trying to weasel out of paying employees even minimum wage, must less the overtime they’re owed, I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to come across a story like this. An employer doing the right thing by their employees without even being asked.
Kudos to the city of Fayetteville, Arkasas!
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