Frivolous lawsuits aren't anything new, but this is an eye-opener straight from annals of "office humor." It turns out that in the past year "several" companies, including UnitedHealthGroup, Cigna, and AT&T have had employee-filed lawsuits brought against them for unpaid time. That "unpaid time" is the minutes each day employees spend booting up and shutting down their computers (also their time-clocks), which they claim adds up to an astounding 15-30
per day. Astounding, that is, if you've never worked in a corporate office with a terrible IT department. If you have, you'll probably agree that this figure may, in some cases be on the mark, if not a little conservative. The employees claim they should be paid to work while the boot-ups and shut-downs are happening, since during that time they're doing tasks like paperwork or "arranging their calendar," while the companies counters that they're probably smoking, getting coffee, or talking to people. We're not really going to judge the veracity of these suits en masse -- we'll take them on a case-by-case basis, but there does seem to be something suspicious about this many people claiming to still use paper calendars.
[Via
Wired]
posted November 20th 2008 3:43PM
Under that philosophy, should my employer pay me for my time spent driving to and from work? Seriously. I have to drive to work in order to work, right? Or in the elevator on my way up to my office? What about when I'm home and thinking about work. In fact, they should just pay me 24x7x365, because even when I am at home asleep, I am only trying to get some rest to be more productive at work the next day...
Agreed.
[Non-wage-]Slaves had it good. Free board; no travelling required. 'Freedom' is a step backwards in my opinion.
I agree with this story, companies should pay. I've worked at a AT&T call center and a Bluecross Blueshield call center. At the at&t call center we couldnt log in until it was time to work because of a previous lawsuit for this same reason. It usually took 5-10 mins to log into all systems and get ready to field calls. BCBS on the other hand wants us to be at work early and log into similar systems that take approx the same time and not get paid. I figure its only a matter of time before they are sued as well.
Maybe we should blame on Microsoft after all it's the OS that takes up the boot time. IT dept just set it up, but MS is the one that design the OS and it takes them 15 years NOT to be able to figure out how to reduce the boot time, instead, take longer and longer to boot as increasing the version number.
I work for @#$%^$ and they use XP... we don't have to boot up our computer, but login takes about 2mins every morning... they expect you to get there early everyday just to login and not pay you... so I feel these guys since that's a total of over 20mins a week, 40mins a pay period and 17.3hrs a year... missing out on $224 a year at my current wages... oh I'm pissed now that I had to break it down!!! lol
-- this is after including login, logoff, breaks and lunch... not to mention everytime we have to get up the cpu has to be locked and then unlocked...
If the company doesn't want to pay for employees to wait for their old computers too boot up then they should just leave them on all the time...
If you photocopy 100 pages you don't stop getting paid because your waiting at the photocopier waiting for your copys to finish...
I work for one of the companies mentioned and let me tell you, waiting for the damn computer to boot up and clock in is annoying as hell!! Yes our computers do take about 5 minutes to fully boot up and clock in!
If it was my computer it wouldn't be an issue as I would have it tweaked to boot in under a minute.
And while my system is booting up I am doing other work related items.
Waiting on a computer? I've had a job where I've had to wait for someone to print me a temporary pass to clock in. All too often that took a minimum of 30 minutes. At least there are ways around slow boot times (not logging off or powering down), but there's no way around waiting for a temporary pass.
If I worked at a company like that (yes, I'm at work and posting during a build) and didn't want to leave I'd probably exert considerable effort to ensure that I wasted the same amount of time stolen from me by my oppressive employer but even that wouldn't work for me. If I'm at your place of business, I'm there because you want me there not for my own amusement. If you want me there, pay me. Simple as that. Assholes.
Don't these companies realise that treating people like cattle isn't that much of a motivator?
How about you just clock out/in when its off/booted up?
If your computers booted as slow as 15-30 minutes, wouldn't you use a paper calendar, too? I probably would.
dygituljunky
This is ridicule, it is not my fault if the computer starts slowly. I am not payed for the time i spent
going from home to the office, and now i have to pay for the slow performing computer and software.
This is madness!! Stop being so greedy Americans.
Why don't you managers start looking at important things as productivity, products, process improvement
reduction of cost by innovation instead of looking at how make lives of your workers a hell.
I work at an AT&T call center (and no I won't be joining the lawsuit) but this is a ridiculous and frustrating situation that we face.
It takes 6-9 minutes for my computer to start every day till everything is up and running. We can get disciplined if we touch the computer before our scheduled start time. We are supposed to start taking calls at our scheduled start time - despite the computer not being up and running - meaning we can't actually assist those customers. Our time clock works on a different system than the phones, we can't log into the time clock (which is a web page) until about 4-7 minutes into the boot up process by which time we're already supposed to be on our first or even second call. From this point you have two options, you can push the Not Ready button and have this negatively affect your stats, or you can log into the phone and log back out to avoid the not ready, but take a hit on your schedule adherence. If you don't log into the phone for the first four minutes of your schedule, you get a quarter of an attendance point, which can build up and really bite you in the ass later.
Depending on how my month-to-date stats look I either take the not ready or the adherence hit, but it is definitely a ridiculous and frustrating process. The correct solution would be to schedule the first 10min of each day for getting the systems running.