Frequent Long Distance Overnight Travel Time

HR Law Fan

A non-exempt employee's job requires him to frequently travel all over the country and the world installing a machine. He usually flies to one job at a time and then flies home; occasionally he flies from one job to another and then returns home. He usually stays at each job for several days. Sometimes he spends a whole day, more than 8 hours, flying to get someplace; in fact, for international travel one trip can overlap two days if you use his originating time zone as the basis for figuring. Sometimes he spends an entire day working and then first gets on a plane, after 5 p.m. and fly for several hours to return home.

1) Do all of his travel hours count as "time worked?"

2) If so, if he has a return trip that arrives home at 2 a.m., does the time from midnight to 2 a.m. count as work in the next day?

HR Law Fan
California

Mikki H

It is my understanding that for a non-exempt employee, travel time on an "away from home" trip would only include the hours travelled during the normally scheduled workday. For example, if his normal day is 8:00-5:00 M-F then only travel time during those hours is counted for time worked (even if travelled on the weekends).

We just had a situation where we considered the 2-day seminar to be local and expected the employee to make a day trip on each day, this would have given the employee 12 hours worked each day. It's only about a 2 hour drive and we have always considered it a day trip. We specifically stated that hotel accomodations were not provided. The employee elected (and told us after the fact) to pay for the hotel on her own, and went down the night before (travelled after hours) and stayed 2 nights. She expected to get paid her travel time and we concluded that it went against the overnight trip rules. We went back and forth on this since we determined it was a day trip, but she turned it into an overnight trip, but ultimately decided that we would apply the "away from home" rules.

Gillian

I'm also in California and have some similar issues but not near as signicant as yours. We can pay at different rates for the travel hours, so long as the pay is not less than minumum wage. Before you do that, however, you should think about morale issues with the employee. Send me your FAX number by E-Mail and I will send you some information that will get you started.

Gillian

Must have been on another planet yesterday. My E-Mail address is [email]shugh@westernu.edu[/email]

System

There are several different rules for different scenarios, and it strains my brain to try to figure them out. Here's a good article that should help:

[url]http://www.hrhero.com/federal/overtime1.shtml[/url]

James Sokolowski
Senior Editor
M. Lee Smith Publishers