Seyfarth Synopsis: A federal district court held that "boot-up" and "shut-down" time in a call-center environment is de minimis and therefore not compensable.

It has been hornbook law since the early days of the FLSA that disregarding small increments of otherwise compensable time does not give rise to back overtime liability under the de minimis doctrine. Indeed, the Supreme Court held as far back as 1946 in its Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co. decision that "[w]hen the matter in issue concerns only a few seconds or minutes of work beyond the scheduled working hours, such trifles may be disregarded" and that "[i]t is only when an employee is required to give up a substantial measure of his time and effort that compensable working time is involved."

But wage-hour practitioners also are well aware of the recent challenges in arguing for application of the de minimis doctrine. Citing Justice Scalia's passage in Sandifer v. U.S. Steel Corp. (2014) that the "de minimis doctrine does not fit comfortably within the statute at issue here, which, it can fairly be said, is all about trifles," some courts have curtailed the de minimis doctrine considerably, reasoning that small increments of time nevertheless can be compensable when they are performed regularly, involve larger amounts of time when aggregated, and/or can be tracked by technological tools with little administrative burden. This especially has been the case under California wage-hour law.

The curtailing of the de...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMikwFodHRwczovL3d3dy5tb25kYXEuY29tL3Vu...