Workplace BlackBerry Use May Spur Lawsuits

An anonymous reader writes "From an article on cnbc.com: 'As employers hand out electronic devices to their employees at a greater pace, there are growing concerns that workers eligible for overtime pay, known as non-exempt employees, could begin suing their employers for overtime hours earned while tapping on their devices during after-work hours. As a result, lawyers are advising their corporate clients to update their policies and handbooks related to BlackBerry use and reconsider who gets a device.'"

Re:Let's not forget corporate laptops...

[afidel]

Actually you can't arbitrarily classify someone exempt. There are fairly strict (were much stricter before Bush) guidlines about who is, and who is not exempt. Basically your job had to either be managerial or tightly classified as a purely creative job with the ability to set your own schedule in order to be classified as exempt.

Re:Turned it down

[ckaminski]

Why? They don't PAY me for 24/7 support, and it's not end-of-business threatening. If they want it done so bad, they can call my boss and have him call me to fix it, with the understanding that I get a comp day. Period.

I'm not going to let my blackberry wake me up for every little email thrown out.

Re:Turned it down

[NMerriam]

If a fsking fileserver is down you should be freaking fixing it, not waiting till hundreds or thousands of manhours have been wasted the next morning!

If the file server is that important, they should have 24/7 staff on-site to keep it running.

You can't complain about the prohibitive cost of having a professional IT staff available all hours and then turn around and say what a financial disaster it would be if they weren't there.

As an Exchange consultant...

[SirKron]

I have been telling my clients this for years. Wisconsin law clearly says that if a manager knowingly allows an hourly employee to do work at home then they must be compensated for their time. So, all my designs include the ability to and documentation on how to disable mobile access, remote email access, etc. for hourly and other non-exempt employees. If the employee saves all their email they can export all the email sent by them after hours, compile the data, and then prove a pattern of working in the evenings. If they were a 30 - hour employee they can sue for the remaining hours and benefits. This is a lot of risk for employers.

Etiquette guide

[dustpuppy]

I remember reading an etiquette guide where the rule of thumb was 'proximity'.

So if you are talking to someone face to face and you get a phone call/pager/email/IM, then you ignore those and focus on the face to face conversation because that person is closer.

Or if you are on phone call, and you get a pager/email/IM, then the caller is 'closer' to you (since you are engaged in a real-time voice conversation) and you would ignore the others including the IM (which is real-time, but less 'close' since it's not voice).

Basically it comes down to common sense and respect for the other person. Ever since I read that, I've been following that rule of thumb to the point where people I'm having conversations with are shocked when I let a phone call go to voicemail rather than interrupt my chat with them.

Mind you, the shocked look is often replaced with one of admiration that I consider them important/interesting enough that I am giving them my undivided attention. To me, that's proof that the rule of thumb is worth following.

Re:Now is about the time...

[tx_kanuck]

That's what I like about Alberta labour law. OT is not set by salaried or hourly, but by managerial status (with a few execptions). If you are not a manager, and are salaried, they have to pay overtime.

In the US there is no voluntary overtime

[Anonymous Coward]

I truly hope the employees lose in this case, as I consider it unasked for overtime. Completely voluntary overtime. Unless the employers gave the blackberry with the message "now you are reachable at all times", in which case the employer deserves to lose - if only for sheer stupidity.

the Wage and Overtime laws require you to be paid for any 'time' you work. It's actually against the law knowingly not pay $$ when they work. Include work deal like; work tonight and take off a day next week or any other methods you can think of where you work more than 40 hours.

Re:Now is about the time...

[CrazedSanity]

That reminds me of a story that maybe some of you can relate to:

Me and a few other developers worked on a huge project for my previous employer involving a rewrite of an old website. The old one had a terrible logging system (file-based), several very non-normalized databases that had many things that were very case-sensitive (I think there was a "membership" field for each user's record, wherein "Premium" gave them full access, but "premium" gave them nothing). There was a terrible conglomeration of systems to run the searches, such as one that ran a grep against a 3 gigabyte text file... The new project's goal was to convert it into a completely dynamic, database-driven, e-commerce system... needless to say, it was a pretty large endeavor.

Anyway, me and the other main developer, we'll call him "Joe," worked 9-12 hour days working on this beast, trying to meet a 6 month full release deadline. We had an agreement with our employer that one of us was able to sleep in, provided someone was available for internal tech support in the morning. It worked pretty well until we got our wires crossed and we both slept in on the same day. We returned to work and got mauled by our employers, revocation of our afore-mentioned agreement, and subtle threats of firing.

Now me and Joe were working long days with no ability to sleep in. We became increasingly less productive, with a higher level of bugs introduced into the system, and overshot our full release deadline by 3 months. Instead of doing a beta release as we recommended, they forced a full release... they realized almost immediately that the new system wasn't up to par, and our long days got even longer (by 2-6 hours, without any extra days off) as we fixed the new system, maintained the old system, and attempted to synchronize data between the two.

The employer tried several "incentive" programs. Holding back profit sharing bonuses (the ones that would "always be there, guys") if we didn't make their absurdly short deadlines or insanely over-ambitious milestones. That didn't work, and even caused Joe to quit; he'd bought a house based on the idea that the profit sharing would always be there, and he nearly lost it when our bonuses were held for over 3 months... I tried to explain to employers that trying to make us meet such short deadlines would only encourage hastily-written, poorly tested code, to which he responded (something like): "No, you won't. Just write the code fast, but I won't let you cut corners to do it. Just meet the deadlines."