Do employees get OT for after-hours online training?
May 7, 2009 by Jim GiulianoPosted in: Employment law, FLSA, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, Pay and benefits
Online training has become common and convenient. But suppose employees do it after work at home. Do you have to pay them overtime, under the Fair Labor Standards Act? The short answer is “yes,” but there are complications.
The ruling comes in the form of an opinion letter from the U.S. Department of Labor regarding a case in which an employer required some workers to take training via the Web. Here’s what the DOL said about it and the FLSA rules.
First, you don’t have to pay OT for any type of training if all of the following criteria are met:
- Attendance outside the employee’s normal working hours is in fact voluntary (attendance is not voluntary if the employee is led to believe that present working conditions or the continuation of employment would be adversely affected by not attending)
- The course, lecture, or meeting is not directly related to the employee’s job (training is directly related to an employee’s job if it is designed to make the employee handle a job more effectively as distinguished from training for another job or to learn a new or additional skill)
- The employee does not perform any productive work during such attendance.
If all those criteria are not met, then the employer must compensate the employees for their training time.
Now, here’s how the DOL’s opinion letter applied those criteria to online training done after hours at home: Essentially, DOL said, the rules are the same. If the training doesn’t meet all of the criteria listed above, you have to pay the employees for overtime.
Go the DOL Web site to see the text of the opinion letter.
Note: Opinion letters often indicate how an agency is inclined to rule on a similar dispute, but such letters (a) do not carry the weight of law and (b) apply only to the specific instances mentioned in the letter.
Tags: department of labor, dol, fair labor standards act, FLSA, HR Training, ot, overtime
May 11th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Do we have to pay OT for classes taken to complete education required for the job, ie: teacher certificate? Our teachers are required to have classes to teach and are given a period of time to complete the courses.
May 11th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
I see Karen’s problem this way: Are the teachers considered “professional” or more specifically, Salaried Exempt, or Salaried Non-Exempt (SNE)? If Salaried EXEMPT then obtaining and maintaining certification for teaching is not necessarily a compensatory issue. HOWEVER, if SNE then it is a different story. Those more versed in DOL regulation please correct me if I’m mistaken.
My wife was a “permanent substitute” for a privatae school, and qualified for Overtime pay – thus SNE. This position guaranteed her a full week’s work whether she substituted in a classroom or not. Like all other staff at the school, she was asked to do research and write a position paper so the school could achieve their next level of accreditation, but was not given time “on the job” to do this. It was homework required by her employer. This bears repeating: REQUIRED BY HER EMPLOYER. However, she was not compensated. I told her that was not right from a legal sense, but she did not press the issue at the time. Just last week, she was told that due to cutbacks, 4 positions are being eliminated and she does not have a job next school year. She now resents spending many hours “unpaid,” for the benefit of an employer who has eliminated her position. But she is not of the character to turn around and file a charge against a small struggling (newly accredited) private elementary school.
May 11th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Bruce, your wife must stand up and fight for what is hers. What’s right is right. She should file a claim with the DOL.
May 13th, 2009 at 10:05 am
I fully understand the problems we face in the pay for time in class rooms and on line.
My question is in reguards to the continuing education required by states to keep up certifications .
Wisconsin requires approved hours to maintain current on the list for masters electricians, also for cretified electrician status. Many other states require seperate license ,class and or test to be eleagble to work there.
Milwaukee will require certification as an electrician to be on their out of work lost soon.
These certs and schools are in addition to the journeymen wiremen union card we have in our posession.
When asking the local unions about compensations I was told these classes were volintary and therefore not compensatable.
The word volintary really means if you don’t want the job you don’t need the classes.
So how do we earn a wage? If we don’t volinteer for the class we don’t get the job.
I have taken OSHA 10 so many times I can not even recall the number of times. On the OSHA 10 card is says this card will not expire, at the hall it must be from a specific date, which varies from local to local.
If I calculated all the classes I have volinteered for in the past 30+ years I would have 1000 hours coming.
I am just discusted.
Steve