The Department of Labor (DOL) recently issued a pair of opinion letters detailing how the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) applies to two situations where employees commute during the workday.
In one opinion letter, the DOL said the employer of a large, non-exempt workforce wouldn’t be obligated to pay employees for the time they spent commuting midday. At the time of writing the letter, the employer hadn’t permitted its office employees to work from more than one location (i.e. home, then office) in a single workday. The business wanted to grant these employees the flexibility to do so, but didn’t want to compensate them for time spent commuting.
The employer wouldn’t have to compensate these workers for midday travel under such circumstances, the DOL said. The agency clarified that “an ordinary home-to-work or work-to-home commute” would qualify as a category for which businesses aren’t required to pay workers, akin to lunch breaks or off-duty time.
Andrew B. Rogers, an administrator with the DOL, cited previous case law underpinning this analysis. A statute enacted in 1947, called the Portal-to-Portal Act, does state that workers should be compensated for certain activities that occur during the workday, but commuting from home to work doesn’t generally fall under one of these categories, the official said.
A separate opinion letter, however, does offer one example of a situation in which an employer would be required to pay an employee for their commuting time.
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