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."

Re:15 minutes?

[GNUChop]

It's all the crap they load. Anti-virus, M$ Word preloads and all that other crap Windoze people think they need and the malware they don't know about. I've seen W2K take 5 to 10 minutes and can believe that Vista is much worse. I know, it's hard to imagine when you run an OS that does not have to be booted for months, but that's life in the cubicle. Stupid and ugly.

I'm unfamiliar with how payroll is done for hourly

[rolfwind]

workers these days in the big companies. Do they clock in once they log onto their network or what?

More than just Windows....

[linumax]

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.

Situation more complicated that it seems

[l2718]

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.

Re:More than just Windows....

[Somegeek]

Get a Mac, set Energy Saver to boot and shutdown the computer at pre-arranged times.

This is not just the province of Macs, many pc's have similar capabilities to boot at preset times, albeit that particular feature gets configured in the bios.

Re:Yes.

[j-cloth]

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.

Portal to Portal issues

[Animats]

This is a classic issue. The Federal Portal to Portal Act does not favor the employee, but California has slightly more favorable regulations.

Some current active issues in this area include whether employees who work in places with elaborate security checkpoints should be compensated for delays in getting through security. This came up in the context of a nuclear power plant. The current court decision is that such time need not be compensated. It's also been held that time in line at a time clock isn't compensated either. (But that tends to even out; the delay in clocking in costs the employee, but delay in clocking out pays the employee.)

The "boot time" issue is interesting. Historically, big plants handled "clocking in" at centralized locations near the plant entrance, so, by default, employees were paid for time in the building. With more elaborate timekeeping systems, it's tempting for employers to start timing when the employee reaches their work location and performs some action like a login or a card swipe.

Many union agreements cover this. It's a classic issue in coal mining, which is where the term comes from. The United Mine Workers negotiated "portal to portal pay" in the late 1940s. Previously, miners were paid only for time at the working face (where digging takes place) in the mine. It can take an hour in a big mine to get from the mine portal to the working face, so this is a big deal.

Re:15 minutes?

[zippthorne]

They might have a combination of windows 2000/NT, slow network, roaming profiles, everyone logging in at the same time, and a gigabyte of unnecessary junk foolishly located on the desktop (so it has to be loaded with the profile, over the network, at the same time as everyone else is doing the same thing.

I can see a company doing something stupid like that.

Absolutely!

[ohtani]

Booting up a computer IS work. It's as much work as somebody waiting for diagnostic results, or a supervisor "supervising", or a programmer compiling. They may not be making a direct impact at the time, but they have invoked the actions and are required to invoke said actions and required to wait for said actions to complete.

The employee should not suffer a lack of compensation due to the lack of the ability of the equipment supplied by the employer themselves. If they want to not pay the employee, they need to invest in an instant-on technology of some sort.

On the OTHER hand however, if one is, for instance, compiling, and it continues through and beyond a break (such as lunch), it makes sense for the employer to not compensate (if they do not compensate for lunch, as the break time is no longer considered a required period of labor and observation and supervising and what not. The employer can definitely push for such longer periods of time to be started before a break.

And this is not to say that the employer cannot have an employee be productive in other ways while a computer may be booting or whatever. Ask them to straighten their desk or something.

And to echo a lot of other people's comments, yeah, seriously. 15-30 minutes for BOOTING? I don't care if they "start programs". 15-30 minutes?! First off if they're "starting programs" that is DEFINITELY being productive. But if it's seriously taking 15-30 minutes for an individual to wait for a computer to start up or shut down, they have MUCH worse problems on their hands.

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for future reference, that's against the law. If it was recent and you feel like being an asshole, you may want to contact the department of labor. [dol.gov]

existing precedents

[redshirt]

This one is a slam dunk for any competent law firm. It used to be the case the coal miners were not paid for the time spent donning and removing protective gear. Despite the very different industries, it basically means that if you are required to do tasks to prepare to do work, then you need to paid for that additional time. It's then easy to apply this logic to a computer booting up, as that is obviously a required task. So is shutting down.

Who turns it off at the end of the day?

[Loligo]

Even in the Windows shops I worked in, most people just locked their systems at the end of the day and left.

Who reboots every day?

Re:shentino

[eh2o]

The approach still works just fine, and on a modern system the behavior can be customized through BIOS settings. Restoring the previous power state after interruption is a standard setting for a server.

Re:15 minutes?

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell does it take anyone 15 minutes to boot up their computer. Even at it's most malware choked, my girlfriend's took less than 10 to get to desktop.

When you work for a Fortune 100 they run all sorts of scripts, upgrades and inventories at boot up and shut down. On any given day it can easily take 15-30 minutes....especially if everyone is logging in at the same time. It's stupid and it's completely the employer's fault but it's what they do and it really does take a ridiculous amount of time.

Re:Absolutely

[Mr. Beatdown]

I found an article about it. And it's written by real lawyers. Would you like to know more [sglaw.com]?

How does the machine get turned off

[TRRosen]

If your off the clock when you punch out on the computer. who turns it off! You can't, your off the clock!

If your required to be there its work...this is like saying a waitress isnt working until a customer comes in.

Re:It's the law.

[blackchiney]

And this is why pilot unions are one of the most powerful, fiercest unions on the planet. Because most of the professionals have had to deal with this shit on their way up to working in a fleet. They don't get paid until the engine is on but they get paid plenty. In general this only applies to the mainline and widebodies. It's relatively easy to replace a Twin Otter pilot (no offence), it's quite a trick to find a replacement 757 pilot who is current and has the hours. Most of the airlines try to spin it as the senior pilots calling the strikes ($200k,pensions,etc), generally, it's the juniors (regional pilots) who are trying not to get screwed

Re:Yes.

[Sancho]

And that's also illegal. I don't think that there's an at-will state in America where you can be legally fired for reporting that your boss was doing something illegal.

Re:Yes.

[pentalive]

Funny thing "At will" employment

You get: To quit on a moments notice.

Your Boss gets: Able to fire you for no reason also on a moments notice.

Re:Yes.

[Sancho]

Funny thing is, they don't get to fire you for no reason. There are lots of reasons that they can't fire you, including but not limited to firings for the person's gender or race, the person's age (if over a certain age) and retaliatory firings for the worker filing a worker's comp claim, for taking leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act, or for whistle blowing (which is the specific issue discussed here.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_termination [wikipedia.org]

Now like I said, this varies somewhat by state. There are some federal statutes (like the protected class cases), but mostly, it's defined by the state. And like I said, I don't know of any state where it's legal to fire a person for whistle blowing, though if some allow for that, I'd love to know.

What often happens in these cases is that circumstances arise for which the employer wants to retaliate against the employee, so they fire him/her. The employee then files a lawsuit claiming wrongful termination, and gives the reason. Generally speaking, these cases are decided upon a preponderance of the evidence, so if the employee gets into court and says, "I reported my employer for doing this illegal thing, and then he fired me!" it's going to be up to the employer to prove that either a) the firing was for no cause (pretty hard to do with) or b) that the firing was with cause, and here's the list of reasons why he was fired.

The judge or jury or whomever then weighs the evidence to determine whether or not the termination was illegal.

"At will" isn't as simple as you tried to make it.

Re:15 minutes?

[RogL]

Seriously folks the dept of labor only represents employers not employees. They WILL NOT go after an employer for not following the Fair Labor Standards Act. They only ASSIST employers in being COMPLIANT (this is there stated policy).

Incorrect: I can't speak for all states, but back in the late 80s I received an overtime settlement that the NJ Dept. of Labor nudged my former employer into. This was after I had already left the company - I received a check and explanatory letter in the mail.

The company had "promoted" several hourly employees to salaried positions, without an increase in pay to compensate for the unpaid expected additional hours. In effect, adding unpaid overtime - they frown on that. Someone complained to NJ Dept of Labor, they sent somebody out to review the payroll & HR records. Dept of Labor estimated the unpaid salary, and forced the employer to compensate us.

No lawsuit was involved.

So it's worth a try - believe it or not, some government agencies do try to ensure employees are treated according to the law. If your state's Dept of Labor isn't helpful, you can still consider a lawsuit, but the gov't may proceed themselves.

And this is a fine example of Unix superiority...

[master_p]

In Windows, the profile has to be copied locally, because Windows do not really have the concept of 'logging in a server'. In Unix, this situation does not exist, because users actually log into the server, their profile is stored there, and the X-Window system is simply an interface to remotely running applications.

When I was in the University, I could log in from any Sun workstation and instantly get the same desktop, from anywhere in the Campus. I frequently changed stations in a day, depending on course and activities. It would be a great problem to use Windows and have to wait 15 or 30 minutes for my applications to start.

Give and take

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a company where we clock in/out using a program on our computer. Obviously I lose a few minutes at the start and end of each day, but not 15.

If they were asking me to move boxes or whatever before I was clocked in, I would refuse, and I think anybody else should, too. While the computer is booting, I'm getting coffee, going to the bathroom, or whatever.

And I think the other poster is right - as long as this is a minor annoyance, I don't complain about 5 minutes here and there. Otherwise my employer might start docking my pay for my Slashdot time.

Re:Yes.

[immcintosh]

You missed the point. He said they get to fire you specifically for no reason, which is absolutely perfectly legal everywhere (at least in the US). Wrongful termination requires you to prove that there was a specific reason you were fired, and further requires that that reason be one of a certain set of categories that are protected. In other words, there are many reasons by which your employer can't fire you, but no reason isn't one of them. All they have to do is simply go up to you, say, "You're fired," and then send you packing, and as long as there wasn't some sort of obvious pattern pointing to a protected class, there's nothing else to it.

Re:huh?

[BlackSnake112]

That was his work week. I remember George saying "these hour long work weeks are killing me".

But yes he did press that button the whole time though. And often his "button press finger" was swelled up.

And now I feel very old and stupid for remembering that.

Re:Yes.

[cayenne8]

I've seen windows 'hang' on something when you click shutdown....and not actually shutdown. I've been on sites where security would ding you if you just stood up to go get a coke and not lock your machine. Leaving it on overnight was also a no-no.