Takeaway: This decision underscores the responsibility of employers to ensure accurate and fair compensation for all work performed, regardless of how minimal it might seem. Employers must be diligent in their timekeeping practices and should implement systems that capture all compensable work time. Failure to accurately record time spent on necessary tasks such as booting up computers could result in significant liability.

A call center operation might have violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by failing to pay overtime wages for the small increments of time that its employees regularly spent booting up and shutting down their computers each day, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled. The appeals court reversed a district court’s grant of summary judgment to the employer and remanded the case for further proceedings.

A certified collective of call center workers alleged that their employer violated the FLSA by failing to pay overtime wages for the time that they spent booting up and shutting down their computers each day. Workers were required to use a computer timekeeping software program to clock in and out for each shift. The employer instructed workers to clock in before opening any other computer program necessary to perform their call center roles; its policies prohibited off-the-clock work.

Workers were required to be clocked in and ready to accept calls at the scheduled start time of each shift. However, company policy prohibited workers from...

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