After reinstating its Opinion Letter Program, the U.S. Department of Labor has been active in answering questions through the opinion letter process, with two more letters in July focused on aspects of the Fair Labor Standards Act and Portal-to-Portal Act.
In FLSA 2026-10, a letter issued July 22, 2026, the DOL answers a question that many employers struggle with, which is whether work done outside of the standard workday is compensable.
In this instance, a field service engineer asked about work spent “receiving pages, calling clients and other engineers to schedule appointments, and driving home from the first client appointment – either while performing these tasks or completing them.” As part of its opinion, the DOL drew specific distinctions between the type of matters someone was engaging in and how that time relates to compensable hours. The DOL determined that simply receiving pages for later review was “incidental” and as such was not compensable. However, time spent calling clients and other field service engineers was “integral and indispensable to your principal work activities …” and as such was compensable time.
The employee here installed and serviced MRI systems and did not have an “office.” The employee simply reported to different sites each day to begin work. The questioner received multiple pages in the morning, which took approximately 15 seconds to receive and at some point, later contacted the individual clients to set up...
SEREMBAN: Five people, including a married couple, claimed trial in the Sessions Court here to charges related to the submission of fraudulent claims under the Social Security Organisation’s (PERK...