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."

Comments

Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yes.

[atrus]

They probably "punch in" on their PC, which is an interesting ploy by the employer. But I agree. The second you're in the door or at your desk, the clock has started. You are "at work".

Re:Yes.

[teh moges]

Perhaps you should try booting a computer in a corporate environment, where there is much more for the computer to do and check before the computer is actually booted in. That said, I've never seen it take 30 minutes, but I have seen it take more then 15.

To add to the conversation, if at desk, then getting paid. If the time clock is running on the computer, don't power down the computer to ensure you are paid for the time you are there. If policy prohibits that, then they need to change their time clock methods.

Re:Yes.

[pcolaman]

If you got injured while cleaning up presumably off the clock but on premises, how do you think an injury lawsuit would end? Probably with a quick settlement to avoid the issue of illegal labor practices. You were hosed, pure and simple.

Re:Yes.

[BrainInAJar]

When I worked for a chain coffee joint, We arrived to our shift, punched in, and we were paid. If we opened, we got there at 4:30am and started getting paid, even though we opened at 5 and the first 10 or 15 mins of the shift involved dumping hot water out of urns and staring in to space trying to figure out where we were and why the clock had such a low number on it. Closing, we kicked everyone out at 11, and locked the doors. Then we cleaned until 11:45 when we stopped getting paid. If anything was left to be done, we left a note, and went home.

This ought to be pretty typical even ( especially ) of shitty low-wage jobs. Now I work salary so I roll in when I feel like it, go home when I feel like it, if I feel like working a 4 day x 9 hour week I can, and so long as my assigned tasks get done I continue to get paid.

If your situation resembles neither of these either you're on the dole, or you're getting screwed by your employer and should file a complaint or unionize.

Don't let your boss fuck you, that's anti-capitalist. Fuck back.

Re:Yes.

[baboo_jackal]

Yeah, the summary also forgot to include this:

Having spent time in call centers observing work behaviors, he said most employees boot the computer, then engage in nonwork activities. "They go have a smoke, talk to friends, get coffee -- they're not working, and all they've done at that point is press a button to power up their computer, or enter in a key word," Rosenblatt said.

The impression you get from reading the article summary is that there are legions of poor tech workers who show up to work, turn on their computers, and then sit there idly in their cubes, twiddling their thumbs for a half an hour waiting for their computer to boot, and their employers dock them for that time.

But once you hear the other side of the story, it sounds to me like these "poor victimized employees" come in, hit the power button, and then walk off to do other stuff which occupies them for the better part of an hour, because booting takes (realistically - c'mon, now) more than ten or twenty seconds (which is longer than the average attention span of say, a college grad with a business degree), and that management is trying to get a handle on it as best they can.

This is a classic case of "blame the technologies for my laziness (because my boss doesn't understand it, either, and he'll buy it!)" This isn't anything new, it's an internal management issue.

Re:Yes.

[garett_spencley]

I consider myself to be libertarian but I don't see any problem with unions. To prevent workers from organizing is contrary to libertarian principles. How can one value liberty and freedom to the fullest extent allowable (meaning to the point where one group's freedoms impede another group's) and yet deny workers the freedom to organize ?

A lot of people, myself included, have observed problems with unions making ever increasing unfair demands and being at least partially responsible for creating the incentive for companies to outsource. Yet I still support a worker's RIGHT to unionize. Just as I support the companies RIGHT to try to get the best labour possible at the lowest cost.

I don't see where people started to get this idea that libertarianism is a synonym for greedy capitalism. Yes we favour free market and don't like government interference. Yet that has nothing to do with favouring corporate execs over workers. People seem to have gotten things so twisted since the US economy went south. Pointing to the recession and saying "see! free market doesn't work and this is what libertarians want !!!!". Try doing some reading first and then ask yourself if you really believe that libertarians want corporations to be able to influence government to increase their power. Libertarians are directly oppose to power in all of it's forms. That's the very fundamental basis of libertarianism. That relates to unions in the sense that unions are a way of countering power levied against workers. There's nothing wrong with that. Certainly not in libertarian politics.

Solution

[Hao Wu]

who is defending a half-dozen employers in computer-booting lawsuits... believes that, in most cases, computer booting does not warrant being called work."

Then don't do it. Leave the computer off, and ask your boss when to begin working.

What do you think?

[QuantumG]

I get paid to post on Slashdot.

Re:15 minutes?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've never booted from a remote disk on the other end of a slow connection, have you?

I'm in the building

[earnest murderer]

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.

Re:15 minutes?

[zappepcs]

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.

my time, my paycheck

[v1]

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.

Re:No.

[TrekkieGod]

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.

Re:More than just Windows....

[negRo_slim]

Connecting to a domain can be a wonderfully long process on poorly configured equipment.