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Should You Get Paid While Your Computer Boots?
An anonymous reader notes a posting up at a law blog with the provocative title Does Your Boss Have to Pay You While You Wait for Vista to Boot Up?. (Provocative because Vista doesn't boot more slowly than anything else, necessarily, as one commenter points out.) The National Law Journal article behind the post requires subscription. Quoting: "Lawyers are noting a new type of lawsuit, in which employees are suing over time spent booting [up] their computers. ... During the past year, several companies, including AT&T Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Cigna Corp., have been hit with lawsuits in which employees claimed that they were not paid for the 15- to 30-minute task of booting their computers at the start of each day and logging out at the end. Add those minutes up over a week, and hourly employees are losing some serious pay, argues plaintiffs' lawyer Mark Thierman, a Las Vegas solo practitioner who has filed a handful of computer-booting lawsuits in recent years. ... [A] management-side attorney... who is defending a half-dozen employers in computer-booting lawsuits... believes that, in most cases, computer booting does not warrant being called work."
This is probably more than Windows booting up and includes the time to fire up the relevant applications (email, office, all custom apps, etc.) and the time these applications take to sync with the server which could take a while due to mass of clients connecting at the beginning of the workday.
Employers generally refuse to pay workers for the time between walking in the door of the factory and reaching the production floor on the theory that they are only going to pay for actual production time. Because of regulations on hourly wages and minimum wage laws this is a big issue. This dispute is partly resolved by the "Portal-to-Portal Act", which generally says (IANAL) that employees have to be paid for tasks which are related to their job (expansively defined). This means that you don't get paid for travelling to work, or for extra hours just because you arrive early, but once the workday starts they can't decline to pay you for the time it takes to put on your safety gear for example, even though putting on safety gear isn't literally your job on the production floor (the Supreme Court has opined on this several times). In this case the employers are claiming that you don't start doing your job until the computer boots up. Now if you weren't required to show up until the boot process is over they may have a case, but otherwise it's rather odd: booting the computer looks (to me) clearly related to using the computer to do stuff.
Actually, the service industry is a bad example. I worked at a convenience store for a summer and my wife worked at a coffee shop for a while. Both of us stopped getting paid when the doors were locked despite the fact that there was still cleanup to be done. The theory was that we were supposed to be cleaning as the shift was winding down, but time and customers rarely allowed for that. Crappy summer jobs aren't necessarily comparable to career jobs, however (unless you're unfortunate enough to have a crappy service job as your career) because both of us had the option to leave and take better jobs where we were paid fairly.