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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."
Do people who work at the local McDonalds get paid for preparing the restaurant to open at the beginning of each business day and for closing up shop at the end? I sure hope so.
This is the exact same situation. If the employers don't like it, they can pay someone to set up a script to automatically boot the computer half an hour before the start of the business day. I'm sure they can justify the cost once the cost is actually there.
Then don't do it. Leave the computer off, and ask your boss when to begin working.
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You've never booted from a remote disk on the other end of a slow connection, have you?
The person who telecommutes would not get paid for that time, why should the person in office?
Telecommuters can flick the switch and literally get on with something completely not work related - eat breakfast, shower, masturbate, or have sex while the computer boots. Last i checked that was frowned at work, but I guess it depends on the industry.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
That sitting at my desk waiting on the computer doesn't get anything done is irrelevant.
It started with being 10 minutes early. Then it was at your desk and working at 9 am. Now at your desk waiting for your PC to "show up to work" so you can log in and start getting paid.
Besides, if this goes... the next stop is monitoring software measuring every second that you are actually inputting.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
It's not purely the boot time of the computer. Many places require that you open several applications in order to accomplish your assigned tasks. These can take time to load and access as well. If the system administrator(s) use the wisdom of IT to use boot time to scan drives for application and other content audits, it can take quite a while before the machine is actually usable. Same sort of thing happens at shutdown in many places.
I have had myself removed from the 'normal' network profile to avoid all that crap on my work laptop. I archive at home on the weekends (at my cost) and scan at night for malware etc. I do not need their invasive methods as I am not helpless and lazy as are the users who have forced them to resort to this kind of methodology to comply with security policies, SarBox etc.
It is more than possible that people spend 30 minutes a day waiting on routine maintenance processes that are run during bootup and shutdown.
The part I like is that I use the laptop at home, and may be actively running scripts overnight, yes for work. The 'normal' profile includes a forced reboot at 3 a.m. I have spoken quite heatedly several times to IT people about the completely asshat idea that a forced nightly reboot is required for LAPTOPS used by people traveling with the laptop.
IMO, if you are forced to be at work, and to tend to the pc, then it's payable labor.
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in most cases, computer booting does not warrant being called work
The way I look at it is I'm being paid for my time. Time that I can't be off doing something I want to do. How much I get paid for my time of course depends on what I can accomplish with the time they are buying from me.
But for ME, time spent sitting idle at work, time that my employer is requiring me to be there, is time I should be paid for. How many people would be OK with their boss saying hey how about you come in an hour early and leave an hour late starting tomorrow? Not on the clock or anything, I just want you to BE here. You don't have to work. But it's going to be a new requirement around here.
Sounds silly and of course you can't find anyone that would be OK with that, but that's just this issue taken to a little of an extreme to prove a point. Your time is your time. If they want you to give some of it up, they better be paying for it. If it took me 15 minutes to get the computer booted up to punch in, and after I punched out I was required to spend another 15 in the office waiting for it to shut down, you can bet I'd be having a talk with my manager about compensation for my lost 65 hrs of pay a year. That's a week and a half of paycheck lost a year. Not really lost, time TAKEN by your employer without compensation.
Little stuff like that adds up. Don't let them fool you by saying oh it's only 15 minutes, you don't mind that do you? That's cheating me, pure and simple.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The person who telecommutes would not get paid for that time, why should the person in office?
Because the person who is at the office is getting paid for doing one additional thing that the telecommuter isn't being paid for: being at the office.
If the employer told me to be there at 9am, I don't care if there's work to be done or not. Time isn't free, and I could be doing something else at 9am. I could be sleeping in, I could be doing laundry, I could be playing video games. If part of my job is to be at the office at 9am, then I get paid for being there at 9am, whether or not I'm waiting for my tools to be ready or for them to tell me what to do.
If he tells me to be there at 9 and stay until 5, and doesn't give me any work, should he pay me for that time? How would you justify answering "no" to that?
If my employer *really* wants me to start working as soon as I get in, he can pay someone to go through the office at 8:45am and start turning the computers on before I clock in. Oh, that costs money? He could leave the computers on all night. Oh, that costs electricity? It's all a balance, but it's still part of the cost of operating the business. If I'm expected to turn it on, then it's part of my job's duties, and thus it's obviously something that I need to be paid to do.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Connecting to a domain can be a wonderfully long process on poorly configured equipment.
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Have you ever had a job at a place with a large Windows-based network? You'll understand when you do.
There can be all sorts of crap required by company policy, servers to wait on, user accounts to be replicated, login scripts to launch and the most bloated anti-virus because the management got a good deal on it. Company computers are often fairly old, especially in government facilities where I live. I've supported the ones for the social services, for example, and they were dreaming of upgrading to 512MB RAM on XP.
Multiply it by two if encrypted by pointsec.
Unless you're salaried, your boss is out of compliance. When you're ready to move on, make sure he gets a visit from the dept of labor.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
Seriously, greedy managerial types seem to think that a person's entire job rotates around a computer. A computer is a tool that you use to do your job, not unlike a crescent wrench. You pay a mechanic to take the tool out of his toolbox, you pay a person to turn the computer on. If the systems boot slowly, that's the fault of the corporate IT policy putting slow-booting operating systems on computers. If people aren't being paid, what, does their time card automatically start when it's finally loaded by Windows? Then that's some seriously questionable software practices in regards to labor laws.
Agreed, it'd cause way too many problems.
I live in an apartment literally one city block from my workplace, so my travel time is about 5 minutes. Why should I get paid less for being at work 8 hours a day than a coworker who lives an hour away? Unless your commute is such that you can actually work while you're traveling, then you're not providing anything of value to the business. The business shouldn't be forced to compensate you for choosing to live further away than other people.
I find this kind of discussion rather scary. If you are at work place, setting up the tools you use to do your job, then it is work. Full Stop. The discussion should be about whether your boss should pay you (even maybe with a reduced fee) for time spent COMMUTING to get to the work place. But note that this has nothing to do with productivity. Is just bosses harassing people (to maximize profit). I think i wouldn't like to work in the USA.